Financial constraint has caused the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to farm out some of its inspection and enforcement work to eager counties. Downstate Tazewell as well as suburban McHenry and Du Page have signed contracts to monitor local dumps, and Cook and Lake have been negotiating similar programs.
The IEPA has been forced to seek the help of counties because over the last decade its budget has not kept pace with the growth of its duties to protect the environment. The agency has been forced to concentrate more and more of its staff on hazardous waste sites to the detriment of its program to monitor standard sanitary landfills. The danger is that if not properly watched to ensure that dump operators are complying with the law, the landfills could become hazardous sites.
The theory behind the new program is that the counties designated by the IEPA will be able to inspect dumps far more frequently than can the state agency`s thinly spread staff. Frequent inspections should result in cleaner dumps, a benefit for local taxpayers who must foot the bill for the county inspectors. The state provides their training and the forms they use, but not subsidies for their salaries.
Such intergovernmental cooperation and the delegation of authority by the state to subsidiary jurisdictions is not entirely new, even in environmental law. The state has had a fairly successful agreement with Chicago for years to monitor air quality. There is no reason the same can`t be true of garbage dumps.
To make the program work, however, the state is going to have to make periodic, unannounced checks on the counties. There is always the danger of corruption. And even without it, there are real problems about vigilance. In Du Page, for example, the program calls for the county Public Works Department to inspect dumps operated by the county`s Forest Preserve District. The agencies share a common board of directors. That means the county has been designated as its own watchdog, a situation that could cause trouble if some environmental problems are uncovered that could cost the taxpayers money.
In this instance, the state is going to have to watch the watchdog.
