Political Horizons for Nov. 8

• By MARK BALLARD
• Capitol news bureau
• Published: Nov 8, 2009

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The high point of Gov. Dave Treen’s career, many agreed this past week, was creating the state Department of Environmental Quality.

That accomplishment is worth noting, as the Jindal administration looks to make state government more efficient. DEQ is one of the agencies that the Streamlining Commission is considering dismantling.

During Treen’s memorial and funeral services last week at the State Capitol and in Mandeville, Treen was praised as a key member of the Republican Party’s rebirth in Louisiana, which, after nearly a century of insignificance, went from joke to political dominance. Treen’s image as a polite — but ineffective — leader was shaped largely by rival Edwin W. Edwards’ memorable quips.

Tenacity is a better one-word description. And Treen’s efforts to regulate and limit the pollution created by Louisiana’s industries best illustrates that determination.

Treen took office in 1980 as the first governor elected as a Republican since 1877. Edwards, who under the state constitution had to sit out four years before running again, already was campaigning for a third term and opposing pretty much anything Treen wanted.

Winston R. Day, who became DEQ’s first secretary in 1983, said Edwards’ supporters generated “a huge amount of false and misleading information” in order to squelch creation of an environmental agency.

But it wasn’t just dealing with Edwards at the peak of his power. Top advisers rolled their eyes when the governor also took on the nascent party’s staunchest supporters in the business community — who also opposed creating additional layers of environmental oversight — because Treen thought it important, Day said.

“We had some of the worst pollution problems in the United States and they were steadily worsening. Meanwhile, we had one of the least-effective systems to deal with the environment and we were many years behind the rest of the states,” Day said.

The various activities that for years had been scattered over several agencies had been merged into an enforcement arm that was under the Department of Natural Resources. Treen agreed with the complaints that housing environmental regulatory affairs in an agency whose primary mission was to promote the oil-and-gas industry amounted to a conflict of interest, said P. Raymond Lamonica, Treen’s executive counsel.

In 1983, Treen pushed legislation that would move  environmental enforcement out of DNR and create a new agency. To overcome constitutional limits on the number of agencies, Treen had to merge two existing state agencies — the Department of Corrections and the Department of Public Safety — to make room for the new Cabinet-level DEQ.

Within two years of its creation, the Legislature was considering bills that would move DEQ enforcement back under DNR and thereby eliminate administrative duplication. Back in 1986, the sponsor of one measure, Robert Adley, R-Benton, then a representative, now a senator, said, “Our fiscal situation dictates that we have to do something like this.”

The Streamlining Commission is hearing much the same advice today from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in suburban Washington, D.C.

Mercatus recommends turning DEQ into “a policy organization” and shifting its enforcement duties back to DNR, said Maurice McTigue, who drafted the report. He is the darling of right-wingers around the country who seek his counsel on how to make government operations more efficient.