Whether a new chip mill, located on a former coal processing site in Dickenson County, should be allowed to operate is a question its owner thought was answered affirmatively not once, but twice.
Just how naive that belief was, however, is an object lesson in how ill-conceived the government’s oversight and regulation of the environment has become.
When Mountain Forest Products, a division of Pittston Coal, announced its intention to build and operate a chip mill on one of its old coal processing sites, the company sought and received a pair of permits.
The permits were issued by Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality and the state Division of Mined Land Reclamation.
DMLR acting Director Roger Williams said the plan which Pittston submitted was straightforward.
‘‘Pittston basically wanted to reclaim (the site) and industrial development is an approved land use. In fact, it was reclaimed to a higher and better land use ... than we usually see.’’
That Pittston complied with the law and even did a better than average job of reclaiming the old mine site should have given them the green light.
Enter the supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Roberta Hylton.
Hylton became concerned about the possible adverse effect the chip mill, and the associated logging operations that supported it, might have on endangered species.
According to Hylton, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality and the Division of Mined Land Reclamation did not take that concern into consideration.
Hylton says the DEQ’s water discharge permit and the DMLR’s post-mining use permit, when linked to potential harm from logging operations, provide her with the ‘‘nexus’’ to ask the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Surface Mining to suspend the existing permits.
Then, she says, all the agencies can determine whether the company’s logging plans might violate the Endangered Species Act.
Whether Pittston’s logging and chip mill operation would harm the environment is an important question that obviously needs to be answered. But how many departments and divisions of state and federal government must a company face? When is enough, enough?
This never-ending round of regulatory compliance that can and frequently does pit one government agency against another leaves companies completely frustrated, helplessly watching and waiting for some final decision from some agency or other.
Wouldn’t it be far more reasonable and much less costly for government to get its act together so that a business could submit one plan, at one time, at one place, and get a simple ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ by a date certain?
And wouldn’t such a process benefit both business and environmental concerns by deciding things fairly and in a timely manner?
An ethic of conservation is not necessarily incompatible with a high degree of economic freedom. And environmental regulation should be a means to an end, not an abusive end in itself.