Abstract
In the Summer of 2008, I led a group of graduate planning students from the University of Southern California on a visit to China to study finance and governance issues in environmental infrastructure. The focus of our travels was the Pearl River delta and included the city of Foshan, a historic center of fine ceramic production and a fairly typical Chinese industrial city characterized by small factories, many located alongside the Fenjiang River. Each factory had a pipe discharging untreated industrial waste directly into the river. Most displayed concretions at the outfall in the bright primary colors suggestive of the salts of toxic heavy metals such as cadmium and chromium. The river itself, a rather toxic stew, was devoid of visible life. The students were appalled by what they saw.
It occurred to me at the time, that this group, mostly aged in their twenties and mostly from the U.S., had never witnessed this level of pollution at home. The Clean Water Act, or more specifically, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 and subsequent amending legislation in 1977 and 1987, were bold and decisive policy actions that were instrumental in cleaning up U.S. waterways. Long past were the days when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio almost routinely caught fire and a conflagration in 1969 spurred the passage of the Clean Water Act. The success of these efforts was underscored when in 2019, the American Rivers conservation association named the Cuyahoga “River of the Year” in honor of “50 years of environmental resurgence.”
Although there is much to laud in the efforts of the U.S. federal government to bring about policy change and secure positive environmental outcomes, the road to passing this legislation was not particularly smooth. The 1972 Act was passed over the veto of then President Richard Nixon and passage of the Water Quality Act (WQA) of 1987 also required Congress to override the veto of President Ronald Reagan. In “Clean Water Policy and State Choice,” Professor John Morris of Auburn University tells the story of how the WQA shifted the focus of water pollution control policy from categorical federal grant-making for construction to a more flexible and holistic approach that gave states more authority and discretion in determining how water quality objectives would be achieved and how, and by whom, they would be paid for. This exposition on the shift from federal largesse to state responsibility is perhaps more timely in 2023 than it was 35 years earlier as the country appears far more divided on what constitutes national priorities, critical infrastructures continues to degrade and fail, all while federal budget deficits and the national debt continue to grow.
To its merit, the book deals with the rather dry (no pun intended) venue of policy analysis and evaluation in a readable and forthright manner. Although in no danger of morphing into a streaming cable series, it does provide useful insight into the legislative process, the inherent tensions between federal and state policy-making and implementation, and how objectives can be set and realized; in other words, the whole “governance thing.” At a time when the U.S. Congress is often looking to be more performance venue than policy body, there is a real need for Professor Morris’ scholarship.
The book opens with a brief summary of water quality issues, policies, and legislative approaches in the U.S. It lays out the evolving nature of federal, state, and local interactions in this area and how it has changed from the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 through amendments embodied in the Water Quality Act of 1987 to the present day. Mostly it reflects movement from a “Big Government” approach to problem solving to more localized control and responsibility. The keystone of the WQA was the establishment of the of the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) which fundamentally altered the funding paradigm for wastewater treatment works from direct federal construction grants for specific projects to a revolving loan program where states would be freer to shape their own water quality solutions.
“Clean Water Policy and State Choice” can serve as a useful guide at many levels. For those seeking a comprehensive overview U.S. water quality policy, it offers both high- and ground-level perspectives. The individual chapters provide detailed summaries of the relevant academic literature as well as the perspective of a seasoned policy analyst. In this regard, Chapter 3, “The Foundations of Water Quality Policy in the United States” and Chapter 5, “Features of the Water Quality Act of 1987” can serve as stand-alone resources. Chapter 6, “A Model of State Implementation of the Clean Water State Revolving Fund Program” and Chapter 7, “Initial State Implementation of the Revolving Loan Fund Model” are excellent guides to quantitative policy analysis while Chapter 8, Implementation ‘On the Ground’” uses case studies to demonstrate how state-specific conditions in four states affected implementation of the WQA.
Although the focus of the book is water quality policy and its implementation, it also serves as a proxy for a broader analysis of “Reagan federalism” which heralded a transfer of power from the federal government to the states which continues to the present day. In this regard, Professor Morris’ analysis can address a much broader set of issues, Namely, although it might be ideologically attractive to propose giving more power to the states, are they ready, willing, and able to assume that responsibility? This raises many other questions considering the widely differing profiles of the 50 U.S. states in terms of their administrative and financial capacity to maintain and operate large and complex programs of which the CWSRF is only one of many. Some of the challenges faced by states in this regard were discussed by Professor Neil Grigg in a recent PWMP Commentary (Grigg, 2023).
In the concluding chapter, Professor Morris sums up the results of his research and provides some useful insights into future research and public policy needs in water quality. Although directed to water quality, it appears that the continuing movement towards state control of major policy and programs, supported by what appears to be a Supreme Court majority that favors this approach, should be a call to the public policy research community to provide hard analysis of the implications of these decisions. “Clean Water Policy and State Choice” could provide many useful insights and methods for how this work could be done.