Welcome to our sustainability seminar series.
I’m Kishore Rajagopalan, Assosiate director
of the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center.
For those of you who are new, or joining us
over the web, the mission of the center is
to advance sustainable practices, reduce pollution
and enhance human and environmental health
in the industrial and manufacturing space.
We are one of five surveys organized within
the Prairie Research Institute, the institute,
through its, integrative research seeks to
ensure sustainable economic development, enduring
environmental quality, and cultural resource
preservation for the people, businesses and
government of Illinois.
The theme of this spring sustainable seminar
series is to listen to various perspectives
on issues related to sustainability in Illinois,
such as environmental protection, energy and
so forth.
We have encouraged our speakers to articulate
their priorities, ___ needs, opportunities,
and ongoing work in the hopes of stimulating
broader collaboration and to find common ground.
I’m pleased to welcome Jennifer Wallings,
as Executive Director of Illinois Environmental
Council to kick off the seminar series.
Ms. Wallings started as Executive Director
of IEC in January 2011.
She previously worked as Chief of Staff
to State Senator Heather Steans.
As part of their work, she and Senator Steans,
won the outstanding government leadership
award from the Illinois recycling association
in 2010 for their work on passage of Illinois’
first commercial food scrap composting legislation.
She’s also worked for environmental law
and policy center and SCARCE, an environmental
non-profit in Glen Ellen.
She’s also interned for then
Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn.
Jen obtained her law degree and master’s
degree in natural resources and environmental
sciences from University of
Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Before we get started, a couple housekeeping
points, restrooms are in the hallway,
across the reception and
through the door to my left.
In case of an emergency, please stand up
and follow the instructors of John ___.
Where’s John?
There he is, our safety officer.
if you see him running, do so immediately.
With that, Jennifer, it’s all yours.
Thanks everyone and thank you so much for
having me here and thanks for the introduction.
As Kishore said, I’m a graduate of University
of Illinois, I have a Bachelors and masters
in Natural Resources and Environmental
Sciences here and also a law degree
from about 2006, 2007,
getting all of those.
So I’m pretty familiar with some
of the work that’s been done here.
But I really have appreciated learning
more from ___ about what they’re doing.
It really enhances the policy work
that I’m doing in Springfield.
I think even when I was in school here,
I didn’t know that there was this whole
arena of environmental policy, where
we could make ___I’m excited to present
some of this information to you today.
I wanted to talk just a little bit about
what Environmental council is.
We’re an organization
that’s been around since 1975.
Hitting our 40 year anniversary
next year, I think we’re going to make it.
Our organization was founded because
in the 70s environmental organization
throughout the state were finding that
all the good work that they were doing
in the communities would often get repealed or rolled back, or harmed
in some way, because the environmental
community didn’t have consistent ___
in Springfield.
So they formed Illinois environmental council.
Today, we’re much in that same mold…
Although, the environmental community
has enhanced a lot in Springfield
in how they’re represented.
I’m really going to talk about policy a
lot today.
I’m the executive director, but
I’ll tell everybody that I’m a lobbyist.
I know that a lot of folks may be
hear that word and cringe a little bit,
or don’t know what it is, but I’m
definitely proud of the work that we do
and I represent the environmental
community in Springfield before
state legislature as a lobbyists.
I provided some of the handouts here.
Just to give some information,
each year, there are about 250ish bills
that touch on the environment in some way
that we’ll take position on and analyze.
We do this with other organizations.
I should say, we have about
60 different member organizations,
those are organizations like Sierra club,
environmental policy center, Prairie Rivers Network
is a member that’s on our board, we do a lot of
work on ___ based, they’re located up here too.
All those organizations get together and
we work to coordinate them in Springfield.
There’s all the bills that we track, we
provide news and what’s happening in Springfield
and I think folks often find that it’s difficult
to find out what’s happening in Springfield
with environmental legislation.
Of course, we have social media, which is
up-to-date.
I will be in committee and we’ll be tweeting
about what’s going on and what votes are taken
so that people can have a little bit
more transparency on what’s happening.
Also we do a really in-depth
newsletter, if you’d like to be on it.
My email’s going to be in this information.
We do that during weekly during
session, just about what’s going on.
Like I said, we coordinate it’s been a different world, when we first started,
IEC was really the person we hired was the main lobbyist who did work
for the environmental organization,
but now there are organizations that have
their own lobbyist, so we work in making sure everybody’s resources are use them
most wisely between all the different environmental
organizations that do work in Springfield.
We coordinate a lobby day, this year is April 3rd,
if you want to come down to Springfield.
We work on building relationships with legislators,
so they know about environmental issues.
I gave out our 2013 environmental square
card and this is something that we provide,
where we track environmental votes,
particularly the ones that are
most controversial, and provide the public 
scores about how the legislators are doing
so they can understand them.
I find that even though, this is
environmental policy that I’m talking about,
I always have to give short civics lesson.
I’m sure there’s folks here who know
a lot about how Springfield works,
but there are people
who absolutely have no idea.
A little bit, it is kind of unreal.
Sometimes when I describe things that
are happening, I have to take a step back
and remember I’m talking to
an audience, sometimes, not a real world.
It’s very surreal in the work that we do.
But just some basics that you should understand
about the policy that happens in Springfield.
First thing that I find, there are
deadlines for things to happen.
Our legislature is in session about January
through May every year.
They have to pass the budget by May 31st
and they go back to a veto session
that’s usually two weeks,
October November ish.
When I worked for the legislator, a lot of
people would contact the legislator
and be like, “I want you to introduce
this bill right now and I want you to
take care of this right now.”
For most bills, if it’s not the right time
of year to be writing or introducing a bill,
you can’t do it.
So right now, for example, we’ve hit the
deadline… all those are drafted by the ___
the legislator bureau, legislator… anything
you draft, you can write a bill that says,
“Everybody needs to wear blue shirt on Tuesday.”
It has to go into LRB and they have to
put it into correct language, or you can
write something very specific, where with us,
we’ll write specific changes to environmentalist.
You have to get it written.
That deadline has already passed an
after you get it written, you have to get it filed.
Next Friday is actually the filing deadline
for legislation in the Illinois General Assembly.
Then after that, there are deadlines for
committees, there’re deadlines for ___ chamber.
Over again until May 31st.
There are bills that don’t follow these
deadlines, but great majority of them do.
Of course the ones that don’t follow the
deadlines are usually the things like the budget
or ___ form, all of that stuff are things
that happen at various ___ of year.
But this is something important to think
about when you get information about
environmental legislation, I find
that media often gets it wrong.
Which may not be a surprise, but somethings
that when you’re looking at media story
that’s about a piece of legislation
on the environment.
Something to keep in mind is,
think about those deadlines,
and when you are reading the legislation,
try to consider how serious of a proposal it is.
For example, a couple of years ago…
I find this happens all the time
that the media will cover a bill
that’s just been introduced, but it’s never
going anywhere, it’s not out on the committee,
it’s not going to go into committee,
it’s just been an idea that somebody has
and so there’s news article on it.
Whereas there are ideas that are fully
flushed out that go through the first chamber,
second chamber that media never talks about.
So I’ll give you an example.
There was a bill couple years ago that would’ve
permitted a permit for shooting Asian Carp,
which may be a good idea, but
may be an awful idea, but it was a bill
that was never moved forward.
It was never assigned… it got assigned to
committee, it was never heard in the committee,
legislator never intended to hear it in committee.
It just was introduced and there were all
these articles about it.
Could we be shooting Asian Carp in Illinois.
It wasn’t really serious proposal that was
going to move forward.
So that’s just something to take into account,
particularly, January, February, you hear
about the proposals, it might not be something
that actually is going to move forward.
That’s something when we’re communicating
with the public about the work we’re doing,
just making sure people understand what actually
is serious, what is a real threat, what might
not move forward.
I, for example, few years ago we dealt with
this bill that would’ve put a new confined
disposal facility in Michigan for PCBs, which
there’s may be some controversy on the safety,
but this is essentially a plastic bag with
PCVs in it, in concrete, encased in the river
and they were doing it instead of much safer
proposal that was out there.
This was a piece of legislation considered
by the legislature and it should have been
a big deal that the media heard about, but
we never got any coverage for this.
Fortunately, we were able to…
We only got 19 votes in the senate, but that’s
just an example of something that was big
deal, but nobody heard about.
We do best to get those out but you never
know what’s going to get covered.
Something also with being able to pass the
bill, it is much easier to kill a bill than
pass the bill.
If there’s a piece of legislation out there,
it’s much harder to correctively pass something.
One of the things, the next thing I put on
here is, many legislators love the “agreed
to bill”.
This is something we talk about a lot in Springfield.
One of the goal is to remove the opponents
as possible so you mostly are proponents,
or people who are neutral.
If you do have opponents, you want opponents
that don’t have a lot of power to get something
done, so that you can try to move the bill
forward.
This is something a lot of legislators will
do and there will be legislators that will
even vote no on a bill, because there might
be any opponent.
They like to see something that is less controversial
proposal.
We have to strike a balance when working on
an environmental policy, as to going forward,
because if there are enough people who oppose
it, no matter how good of an idea it is, no
matter how important it is, you’re going
to have really hard time to get through.
That’s the last thing I listed on here was,
show me the roll call.
There’s a lot of inter-politic stuff that
is a little bit harder to explain, but with
the roll call, one of the things that you
do is you walk around to all legislators,
if you have a bill that’s going to be contested,
you walk around to all legislators and you’ll
talk to them about how they’re going to
vote on it so you get this roll call.
And often, you’ll deal with that part, I
find to be very important so that you actually
know what the vote is going to be, before
you call it.
Because there’s politics even to….
If you call a bill and it fails, that can
really impact whether you’re going to be
able to call it again and pass it.
That can really hurt it.
Some folks think, “Why don’t we call this
thing and just bring it forward?”
But that could mean that your proposal never
gets heard again.
That could really hurt whatever you’re working
on.
So these are some politics things just to
explain the civics behind some of what we
do.
One of the questions particularly and I talked
to other groups at U of I, I’ve been working
on this portion of my talk.
Because a few years ago when I worked for
Senator Stains, I was talking to a career
class at NRES about what I do and one of the
students asked me in the state senate office,
how much I work with the scientists.
I had to say never.
I had to say that we have never… it never
had been something where we worked on proposal
with the scientist or… may be we heard from
them in letters and that sort of thing.
I kind of have done a little more… there
are a few interesting studies about the role
of scientists in policy.
I know it’s gotten much more difficult,
particularly, obviously climate change stuff
you hear all the news… a lot of those scientist
who have stepped forward on persuasion with
climate change have seen negative impacts.
I see where there’s some hesitation and
it’s getting more so.
But I wanted to talk about the role where
we see scientists and just in my opinion,
where I’d love to see more help.
I think that we often end up with this beginning
expert testimony in the implementation, it’s
most areas where I most see a scientist playing
a role in the creation of environmental policy.
When I was at U of I, different lecturers
were talking..
I had a lot of different professors that had
really bold policy ideas about what they would
like government do.
Things like, when we talk about nutrient pollution,
they definitely had…
We should require these buffer ___, we should
require x, y, and z.
There’s definitely a lot of policy ideas
out there and a lot of policies spark from
scientists.
We’re working a lot right now with…
I’ll talk about it late… with Urbana on
trying to ban on coal-tar and that came from
new scientific studies about health effects.
There’s the idea section and then there’s
often times where we’ll get scientist come
and give expert testimony, to talk to committee
and that sort of thing.
I think a scientist have really important
role in implementation of whatever policy
is passed.
There are all the agencies that might be ___
scientists working for them who have to pass
this thing.
But a lot of bulk of policy development that
happens ends up in the areas where you’re
doing negotiation and persuasion.
Of course, that can be…
I think it can be may be the riskier portion
to get involved with, because you’ll be
advocating for something and it might not
work out.
But persuasion and negotiation portion really
end up being where you’re getting something
done.
I’ll talk a little bit… we worked a lot
on fracking last year, and I’m going to
tell a short story about that.
But I know we used a lot of scientific background
in it, but we didn’t have a lot of scientist…
we didn’t have any at negotiating table,
some involved in persuasion.
But in doing that with just agency scientist
in the room is a really interesting question.
I think the point I’m making here, may be
we’ll talk about this in the question and
answer portion, is just my advocating for
more of a role in persuasion advocacy person.
When I put this up here too, because these
are the two heads of the Green Caucas in the
Illinois legislature.
One is Ann Williams from Chicago, one is Mike
Fortner from suburbs and he is a physicist
at Fermilab.
He’s a scientist that we often work with
a whole lot on getting legislation done.
He’s the House of Republican Chair of the
Green Caucas and may be we’ll talk about
this later, but sometimes we have some difficulties
getting the republican Caucas on to some of
our environmental issues and he’s been tremendously
helpful because he can back it up with the
science part about the policy.
This is just the characters where we divide
our policy into and these are just broad categories.
I know there are more but this is something
you think about when you want to pass a policy.
There are these big four options.
One of them, so say you want to allow a new
sustainable technology.
For example, when he gave my introduction,
there was a portion about the commercial composting
law that we worked on.
We found out that there was tremendous barrier
to commercial composting food scraps in Illinois,
so we worked on doing that.
That was very first section, ___ barrier to
doing the thing that you want to do.
Then of course, there are voluntary programs
where you’re encouraging folks to do something.
Incentives, these are monetary incentives
in some way, although sometimes these can
be permitting incentives, so you might be
just giving up a permit.
I will say that any tax incentive, rebate,
anything that has to do with money is dead
in Illinois.
If somebody comes to me with a bill that they
want to do, I mean tax incentives are great
ways to get a policy done, because you can
offer people funds to do the right thing,
give them a tax rebate, make it cheaper, something
that might be expensive, but this is just
absolutely dead in Illinois, at least for
the next few years because of how terrible
our fiscal situation is.
So this is something that we see as off the
table.
Then there are mandates, requiring that everybody
to do something.
Of course, all of these have different, and
I kind of put this, this is almost like a
level, where we start, where we end, where
we might want to add different policy changes
that we do, but this is just to explain the
framework that we’re kind of working in.
I’m going to talk just briefly about fracking,
but this has really been a huge portion of
last several years of my life, particularly
last year.
So maybe we’ll get some more of this in
Q and A. I know folks have a lot of question
about this and this is something we’ve worked
on a whole lot.
I know Tom Wolf is one of your speakers too
and he’ll address some of this from the
energy community perspective later.
But by this point, everybody probably knows
what fracking is and I’m hoping.
The particular type of fracking that we discussed
in this piece of legislation is horizontal,
high volume, hydraulic fracturing.
There’s vertical fracturing already in Illinois,
there’s actually a horizontal fracturing
already in Illinois, but this is horizontal,
high volume, hydraulic fracturing of which
there is very very little before as we were
doing this.
To add some background to the story, we had
heard about this issue, almost 5 years ago
before there was the moving gas line, before
this was happening, we had heard about some
of the issues that were happening with this
new type of technology and state of Pennsylvania,
and we were very concerned.
In fact, faith in place, ___ in Champaign
was one of the first people to write a bill
on this and introduce it.
When we first had to do this, we had to explain
to legislator, the Senator ___ from this area,
we had to explain to him what this was and
really go into detail.
Even the first few years that we wanted to
pass something, had and extraordinarily weak
bill.
We had stuff on chemical disposure, I think
there was some portion on well casing, which
are important, but extraordinarily weak and
we could not even get it to the General Assembly.
There were not… we’d get it stuck many…we
were just not getting this very weak proposal
through.
And in the meantime, this type of fracking
completely has been, has been completely legal
in Illinois and regulated under the regular
fracturing law.
These laws are entirely insufficient to regulate
this type of fracking.
It basically involved a hundred bucks on a
permit that they had to give in two days and
they had to give it, it’s a shell issue,
not a ___ issue.
So that was the situation that we were in
that these permits had to be granted in two
days.
One of our analogies is that it cost more
to permit a dog in Chicago than it does to
permit a fracking well.
That was the situation that we were in when
we started.
There are…
I put on that other one, just some of the
issues and concerns that we deal with.
But I’m not going to go too specifically
into the environmental issues behind fracking.
Something really changed over the years.
This has definitely gotten a lot more attention.
Particularly what pushed forward was the Department
of Natural Resources and the attorney general’s
office at the end of 2012, looked at our weak
proposal we were trying to get it through
and said, “This wasn’t enough and we’re
going to add our fire power to the work that
you’re doing”.
We definitely had supporters from those really
big powerful entities to be able to pass something.
Even those folks at the end of 2012, introduced
a two year moratorium on hydraulic fracturing.
It was a bill that was introduced.
And there are a lot of folks that want to
see this pass.
I think maybe this will be controversial here,
from our perspective, that might’ve been,
that would have been the best solution.
Just because there needs to be a lot more
research done on what’s going to happen
in Illinois and if there are correlation between
what’s happening in other states.
So definitely needs to be more research done
and that was our preferred option that we
would like to see into ___.
That’s where we started with.
But when I said show me the roll call, we
really worked through the roll call what the
General Assembly looked like, activated with
lots and lots of people.
And found that votes weren’t there.
We weren’t going to get this moratorium
through.
So with that in a fact, we knew that…
If we didn’t do this, the oil and gas industry
was going to write their own rules and they
were trying to pass the bill.
Still difficult, but they might’ve been
able to get it through.
So we sat down, it’s almost a little bit,
there have been interesting big environmental
policies that have happened over the years,
where it’s been interesting of the results
who’s at the table.
So in this case, we had our different environmental
organizations, oil, gas industry, and legislators
that were interested in this at the table.
This is what came out.
And I think you may have heard news about
this.
Ended up being a proposal that was very controversial,
but supportive of because…. and there have
been ___ studies on this now, that our law
is most comprehensive law in the country.
Even California’s law, which was passed
after ours is not as strong as ours is.
It’s not a moratorium, which New York and
New Jersey have, but it was the strongest
law in the nation.
That was something that was affecting this.
We got a lot of push back, there are a lot
of folks in environmental community that were
very upset about what happened.
But we kept moving forward.
Now at this point, where they’re at… it’s
very funny, because now they’re at a point
where DNR is… not giving,… they were giving
permits before the law was signed into effect,
and now they have stopped giving permits as
the rules are being created.
The first draft of the rules that DNR put
out were very bad and, in fact, in some places
that we think they were contrary to the law
and we probably would have won the law suit
if we had gone after it.
But there was tremendous amounts of public
pressure, 5 different public hearing that
thousands of people went to, 40,000 comments
submitted to DNR about this, most of them
against the rules.
So we think that we’re going to have a next
draft that’s going to be much better.
But we submitted 23 pages of legal comments.
We’re hoping that, as fracking rules go
forward, something that’s much better, but
we’re still watching out for it.
I put in here, it’s a huge bill, and these
are just some of the issues, just to give
some key highlights of what ended up here.
I did give a handout on the fracking bill
that’s here, some of the things that I think
are best in it are… we opened pits, which
is where the fracking waste water is stored
are not allowed in Illinois except under emergency
circumstances.
These closed loop tapes, which are much better,
in terms of water and flooding, and even emissions.
That is huge, because most other states have
open pits, where if rains, that’s getting
into surface water nearby.
There are a lot of testing, some of the testing…
the thing that’s really important in this
too, there’s testing beforehand, and there’s
periodic testing during it, and if there’s
water contamination shown, the presumption
of the liability is on the operator who’s
doing the fracking.
The operator has to prove that it wasn’t
them, not be a person who’s well’s been
contaminated proven that it was, which is
much harder.
So the presumption of liability is on the
operator.
There are pretty strict chemical disposure
standards, there’s some trade secrets there,
but there’s still some protections on that.
So that was something.
Another big thing that we don’t have a lot
of in Illinois, is there’s a lot of citizen
suits.
So if something happens that law has been
broken, enforcement agency is not enforcing
the law, then anybody that’s affected by
it can sue and say, DNR needs to be enforcing
this law, or EPA needs to be enforcing this
law.
That’s really a big deal, because that’s
something that… having accountability over
those agencies to do the enforcement has been
a problem.
There are lots of public hearings, and that
sort of process in this.
Not something that we think is perfect at
all and something we’re going to have to
keep working on.
I know we’re going to work on stopping,
making sure that… there’re setbacks in
state parks, but I think we’re going to
work on preventing fracking under state parks
and national parks so that’s mixed up.
There are only few more slides and then we
can talk about this if anybody has questions.
But that was something really big.
I wanted to end with just a little bit about
what might be happening this year 2014 General
Assembly.
I have a lot more than this, but some of them
I can’t talk about yet, because next Friday
is the bill introduction deadline.
So you will hear about it.
Like I said, if you want to join my newsletter,
we will be releasing all of the bills that
we’re working on.
But I wanted to talk about some of the things
that are top priorities this year.
That top one, SB103 is a fixing the Illinois
renewable energy portfolio standards.
Renewable energy portfolio standards are policies
that states pass and ours is mandatory, this
one, ours is 25% renewable energy by 2025.
This is really important, it’s one of the
best in the nation, but energy market has
had issue because a lot of it has been related
to municipal aggregation, which municipal
aggregation is a great thing, it’s a lot
more people to buy green energy, but it has
changed the way customers are buying from
the people delivering electricity, therefore,
changing the money where they might get contracts.
So it’s really a technical, complicated
accounting issue.
But to give you the bottom line, 2012, we
built 800 megawatts of renewable energy in
Illinois and 2013, we built zero, 2014, we
may also build zero until we’re able to
pass this fix.
So it’s going to be until 2018 until we
can see new contracts for renewable energy.
Of course, there’s things right now throughout
those five years, they can be buying renewable
energy credits, but they’re likely going
to be buying from other states, where they’re
cheaper, but this is a bill that really helps
with more stable market for renewable energy
in Illinois.
That, right now, it’s supposed to be one
of the three.
I don’t know if it will be when it gets
through.
Senator Frerichs has been sponsoring that
and Senator Harmon in senate leadership is
working on it.
So we’re really hopeful that we can get
that one done.
It’s really important bill.
The other two I have on here, the next one,
we have really interesting studies and I think
these will be real interest of folks in this
room.
I don’t have fact sheets today, but we just
gotten introduced.
In the senate, the urban flooding study is
SB2966 and the water law study is SB3047.
There are different changes that we want to
be making on urban flooding and water loss.
Urban flooding one, ___ from technology has
done research on homeowners, homes that there
are damaged and they’re finding that there
is flood plain flooding, but a lot of new
flooding is, if this is where there are not
flood plains and it’s from poor storm water
infrastructure.
One of their goal is to get more green storm
water in, and green storm water infrastructure
in and better ways to deal with storm water
and ways that conserves water, protects water
quality.
This study is going to be a whole state-wide
on urban flooding and changes that can be
made.
That will be an important one.
The other one is on water loss, so it’s
a study on leakage from different water utilities.
This is something that … I think this…
there’s a estimate on how much water is
lost through these and there’s a new accounting
method ___ that they want to get to, where
all utilities are going to have to be looking
at water loss and actually studying their
leakage.
These will be really interesting study, those
two bills.
Next one I talked about coal tar ban, where
Minnesota’s banned coal tar and we are definitely
looking to doing that here.
There’s been new studies on health effects
and cancer risk and air problems from the
coal tar.
So that will be something we’re looking
at getting done this year.
Next one on there, there’s clean water initiative.
This is something that governor’s done.
He’s been really aggressive about expanding
the state revolving fund for clean water projects.
This really focused on wastewater treatment,
but now it’s expanding to number of projects
that are available to the state revolving
fund and expanding the money to different
bonding and worked with federal government.
Those are the two bills that are introduced
so far.
We are working on tweaking those just a little
bit to see if we can get those to prioritize
projects that do a better job of water quality
and conservation, particularly with storm
water.
That was going to be a big deal, but that
will be a big impact on what communities are
able to borrow to get this.
May be not as much done here, but there’s
been a big issue with coke dust, and this
is petroleum coke, it’s this by-product
of oil refining and with tar sand being refined,
there’s a lot more of this petroleum coke
that’s out there.
There’s areas in southeast side of Chicago,
where this petroleum coke ___ stored.
it’s very similar to coal.
In fact, you have to chemically test it to
be able to tell the two apart, you can’t
just tell it by looking.
But the physical properties, they’re still
studying it, but it seems to be that physical
properties are different and dust control
methods that have been used on coal dust are
not working on petroleum coke.
There has been pictures from southeast side
of Chicago, where there’s been big flumes
of black dust.
I saw pictures down there.
I don’t know why this is the thing that
affected me, but residents that went outside
for a picnic and came back in and they were
___ covered in black flacks, just for being
outside in their back yard.
City of Chicago’s working on the ordinance,
but we also want to make sure that this doesn’t
spread to other parts of the state, they’re
not just going to move down the river and
not take care of this product in the way that
they should.
The oil is being refined in Indiana and the
pet coke can’t be stored there, because
Indiana has better regulations on storage
than we do, so they bring it here.
We’re going to look as they bring it, we
don’t want it to come down in river to different
areas so we’re working on making something
that’s more state-wide.
We’re also working on a bill that will standardize
farmer’s markets.
One of the issues… we’re really big on
local food issues and trying to get… particularly
food that there’s some stewardships in growing,
but local food that’s grown here, specialty
crops grown here, in the hands of consumers
and schools and all that sort of stuff.
But we’ve had a problem with farmer’s
markets that they’ll have different regulations
in each farmer’s market.
It makes it hard for farmers to go between
different markets to sell their products.
So making those public health rules more standardized
and the other proportion of this that I really
like is transparency portion.
It would require… there was new federal
laws that require this too.
But it would require that booth that farmer’s
market tell you where the product was grown,
we’re working with Illinois Stewardship
___ on this.
This is partly to combat resellers will buy
wholesaler that are may be grown in California
and they’ll sell it here.
It’s same stuff you’re buying at your
Schnucks.
But they’re selling at the Farmer’s market
for higher price.
Adding that transparency, so when you’re
buying from a Farmer’s Market and you’re
assuming that it’s from locally, you can
tell whether it has been or not.
So that’s something that we’re working
on.
There’s going to be a really big bill on
wild-life conservation with APEC’s predators
this year.
You’ll hear more about that soon ___ (38:29)
excited about that one, just working on protecting
wild life.
We’re doing a lot of work with Prairie River
Network especially on regulations of concentrated
animal feeding operation.
There’s different things with those, there’s
environmental control, there’s local control.
There’s dealing with citizens do provisions
on those that were definitely going to be
working on ___.
I know we want to do more work on nutrient
pollution, but that is one thing that, as
I spoke about earlier, there’s some really
good policy ideas that may be are never going
to be bills that pass, because there’s just
so much politics behind it.
So thinking about new ways to implement that
policy was really important.
That is really what’s going on…
Actually, this is my contact information.
I’m leaving us about 17 minutes for questions,
so I hope you all have a lot of questions.
Thank you so much.
[Applause]
John, do you want to go first?
Back in the old days
We had a lot of cooperation between
Environmental issues
primary legislation
our close
chief advocates
democrat
and republican leader
same things in lawsuit
do you see any hope
trying to
or by having
so I’m going to repeat that for some of
the folks in the Webinar too.
He asked a question about partisanship in
Springfield and making both parties more environmental,
is that one of the ways to summarize that.
That’s a very interesting question.
I’m glad you asked that.
I do find that we are dealing with republican
caucus that is a lot less environmentally
friendly than several years ago.
In some ways… but I feel like we’ve hit
the low point and we’re turning around with
some of that.
I’ll give what’s bad and what I think
is going the right way.
For example, we have a green caucus in the
state legislature.
I should.. our General Assembly is different
than other states, when I go visit other states
and talk to environmental groups there.
Little jealous of some of it.
But we have super majorities of democrats
in both chambers.
Senate is 4 to 19, house is 71-47, so super
majority.
So you can get something done without... without
governor even with some of this, even.
The senate, there are 19 republican, only
one senate republican is a member of Green
Caucus.
And the house, there are number of republicans
that are member of Green Caucus.
It’s gotten to the point where we had more…
less and less, because democrats have taken
republican seats in Illinois.
So there has been that and that’s been disappointing.
There’s definitely been the national trend
towards environmental laws being excessive
regulation has definitely something that has
hit the republican Caucus in Illinois.
When I’m doing this sort of stuff, most
of what I’m working on, there’s a lot
of stuff we’re actually doing that’s deregulation,
where we’re moving regulation back to make
it more appropriate for things like local
food or some of the sustainability stuff,
gray water reuse is essentially prohibited,
because you have to get a variance from Department
of Public Health.
We’ve been working on this issue for six
years.
But that’s an example of where we’re actually
pulling regulation back to sustainability.
I feel like that’s totally untrue.
There’s stuff we’re doing that do more
regulation, we’re doing appropriate regulation,
I’m defending myself.
But we really are working with Republican
Caucus to develop interest and build relationships.
A couple of the bills that I brought up on
the other side are definitely bills that are
sponsored by republicans.
You have things like….
Right here, I mean I know it’s controversial,
but a lot of folks are dealing with PCV landfill
on Mahomet aquifer issue.
Senator ___, not somebody who votes on a lot
of our bills, introduced that bill in the
senate that would have prohibited that landfill.
So there are issues where there is by harvesting
cooperation.
We really work on that.
But I do feel like it’s getting a lot better,
particularly, we worked on a lot…
One of the ways we bring Republicans in a
lot more is through conservation in open space
and land issues, which we also do a tremendous
amount of work on.
Couple years ago, we worked on a DNR funding
bill that was vastly supported by the republicans.
I feel like we’re really making progress
and I feel like that low point, where all
environmental stuff is bad.
I feel like it’s over.
I mean that’s my prediction and my personal
thing, I feel like it’s getting better.
But we’ll see as we go ahead about how that
works.
We definitely have a lot of friends in the
republican caucus.
Do you have a question?
I’m intrigued by your
Sure.
The question….
comments I made about scientists.
That’s..
I mean, from my perspective of what I would
ideally like to see more scientist involved
in, for example, where we’re in fracking
negotiation with some of this, we mostly have
lawyers at the table.
It would’ve been great to have somebody
who really knew… we did have a lot of back-up
scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council
had this really amazing geologist, who was
very involved with negotiations.
But I know people in Illinois are doing work
on this.
Of course, sometimes from that perspective,
it has to be a little more reasoned and measured
and it needs to be….
I know what… may be somebody from state
geological survey talking about what’s available,
but there’s a lot more in terms of persuasion
that I think scientists are missing from that
role.
I’m just trying to think of a better example.
One of the things we’ve dealt with a lot
is nutrient pollution.
This is going to contain a lot of my political
opinion perspective on this issue.
So I’m… caveat there.
I think that nutrient pollution issue… they’re
doing some work in urban areas, we need to
do more…
I think we’re doing very little on agricultural
nutrient pollution and this is a big deal.
Just for pollution perspective.
Our contribution as Illinois to hypoxia in
Gulf.
I think this is a really huge problem.
It’s very hard to address.
That’s something, where I wish that may
be scientists were more involved in one of
the things in agricultural communities will
say that the science isn’t there on what
methods work.
People at U of I have been doing the research
on what methods work to reduce agricultural
pollution from agricultural lands for decades.
I know that this is there and I wish some
of those perspectives were being shared when
we’re out there.
I think there definitely is a role in those
negotiations, we had more scientists there,
giving this information, backing this up,
I think that would be really important.
I think there’s just that persuasion role,
I understand that there’s hesitance to get
involved too.
But it’s definitely something where I think
it would make all policy better if we had
more scientist.
There’s another republican colleague, who
is a scientist, who does environmental scientist
for living.
He often thinks that policy gets ahead of
the science and I have to often argue with
him about whether that’s true or not.
But I think that’s definitely an open question
if we had more folks involved in actually
that persuasion that would be really great,
I think we’d have a better result.
going back to last
and then summary says
she asked a question about HP1379 from last
year, which had to do with water privatization
and
still pass despite the environmental communities’
concerns.
I think that’s ###. Not everything…
There’s some bad stuff that gets through,
even despite overwhelming democratic folks.
A lot of it has to do with industry or special
interest in… there was a coal plant that
did coal gas gasification of Petco that has
gotten through the legislature twice and vetoed
by the governor.
That one’s been a problem.
But with that specific bill, we worked on
some effects.
We, in general, have this a little bit…
this has to do with…
but there’s a little bit of bright line
with privatizing water, because we really
have tremendous concerns overall about…
you guys have a private utility here.
When a private utility comes in and buys public’s
water supply, there’s a lot of things that
happen.
Sometimes it’s better, because there’s
infrastructure improvement.
A lot of the times they’re not paying attention
to water conservation the way that they should,
because they’re selling this product.
But the other thing that we’re most concerned
about that companies can’t do anything about
is that you’ve lost the ability of the public
to have decision making over the use of their
waters.
If you have a large fracking project, or you
have a large ethanol project that wants to
come in town, you’ve lost the stuff where
public might be approving the use of large
amount of water.
We’ve actually had projects, where they’ve
been bad environmental projects, but we’ve
stopped, because the community has said, “You
can’t have water here.”
That’s something why we apposed at one,
but that one, a lot of… in defense, some
of those legislators, a lot of them were supporting
it, because there are some small rule water
utilities that are having big problems, because
they won’t have enough money to replace
___
they want
But that’s definitely an interesting question.
That one… we have a lot of no-votes in the
house on that one.
We got a number of people off, but that one
was one we weren’t able to defeat.
Definitely hurt quite a few people.
But in the senate, I think that, one of the
things we put anything on the score card,
I will have handed out at least one handout,
we allowed communicated our position to legislators
in best way we could.
It’s usually handouts on bigger bills, we’ll
do constituent emails and phone calls and
that sort of stuff.
but I won’t ever have put a bill on a score
card that… legislators don’t know our
position on and I don’t think that’s fair.
So we definitely do analysis that way.
This is from online.
What happens if the revised Illinois fracking
rules
to
are not
and what can be done to get the rules
Do you want me to repeat that?
She asked me a question from online, thank
you, about what happens if the revised fracking
rules are still not acceptable before they’re
going to
And what can we do to ensure that they are.
So of course there is a lot of risk here,
but I think that the Department of Natural
Resources definitely feel pummeled, they definitely
feel like they got 40,000 comments on this
issue and it’s a huge problem.
Of course, we still could be presented with
totally unacceptable fracking rules in the
next stage.
Basically, they went through first notice
so they put together these rules for first
notice.
Now they have to reply to all 40,000 comments.
We’re expecting that of what I heard, may
be March or so that they’re done with that.
Then they’ll start looking at those comments
and doing a redraft of those rules, which
then they present to ___.
So there’s definitely… there’s somewhat
of a role for the public still in letting
legislators know that they think this is unacceptable.
But some of it right now is a little bit of
a waiting game to see what actually ends up
getting promulgated.
And what the department’s thoughts are going
to be on this.
After that point, we really have to be contacting
the ___ members.
This is the joint committee on administrative
rule, it’s a committee that is six republicans,
six democrats that approve the rules.
If you want to block them, you need to have
actually eight legislators’ votes to block
the rules.
But it also puts us in a really unfortunate
situation, because if they block the rules
from going into place, there are limits in
the statue, where we might be going back to
a point, where they do give permits and it’s
totally unregulated fracking, which would
be really unfortunate.
But we’re going to fight if these rules
are still very bad.
I think it’s waiting for a little bit, but
then getting to the point where we’re contacting
___ members to let them know that these rules
need to be revised.
The ___ members have a lot of ability… they
have an executive session there, they have
a lot of ability to fight for better things
to be part of that draft.
So I’m really feeling a lot better though
about our possibilities in making these improved
rules.
I could be wrong, but I generally have a good
sense of… what…
I know, I’m predicting the future here.
I feel like what happened over first ___,
we really pushed them in the right direction,
so that’s good.
If you have a
comment on this
at University of Illinois
hydraulic fracturing
but primarily,
but primarily
sustainability issues
I’ve been doing research
management issues
about helping
strategy issues
working with them
maintain
natural resources
aware that nutrient issues
I know they’re definitely aware.
There’s so much so… there’s this nutrient
research education council that the agricultural
interest put together and it’s a voluntary
tax on a fertilizer that is paid and that
goes into this nutrient research education
council, which funds research.
From our perspective, we definitely want to
hit on… this is… well we differ a lot
from some of the agricultural interest is
that we want to see that be a lot more aggressive,
may be…
I mean, our ideal is mandatory ___ management
practices, but of course, that is far away
and I don’t know that there’s a lot of
___ possibility for that to happen… so somewhere,
something in between… it’s just that something
that we… we haven’t worked on a ton…
state legislature really hasn’t considered
a lot of those proposals…
That’s definitely where we want to see.
But I know that they’re aware of it and
I know that they know we’re not happy, we
like to see more done.
I have two more questions
Your first question was it…
Does Illinois use 60%?
I don’t know where we are at with coal usage
at the University of Illinois now.
I know that overall mix in Illinois is pretty
heavily nuclear with a vast majority of other
is coal.
But I know Illinois has its own…
I don’t know, is Abbott still up?
I don’t know where this…
I know they’re getting coal and natural
gas.
They’re using more and more natural gas.
Does that answer what you’re asking?
I don’t really know the exact content…
Some of that is really interesting, because
we have two different grids ___ in Illinois.
You guys are kind of a little bit separate
from that.
The other question about coal tar industry…
I am sure that coal tar industry will not
be happy about the bill that we’d like to
pass.
I know that they weren’t happy about it
in Minnesota.
That’s one of the issues, where we’re
looking more into that.
A lot of these issues I know that some of
what we have, has a negative effect on that
type of industry.
But there are other types of pavement that
are a lot more environmentally responsible.
So looking at those type of things instead
of different types of sealants is something
that we’ll definitely see a growth in alternatives
to coal tar.
So that’s a different Economic benefit.
I’m sure it will very much hurt the coal
tar industry in Illinois and that’s definitely
a side effect of the bill.
Does that answer your question?
removal portfolio standard
folks
there’s a lot of problems…
His question was about renewable energy portfolio
standards and how the current legislation
allows purchase of renewable energy credits,
so how will we work towards this industry
in Illinois?
That is true.
Because we did start with the original bill
had a sunset in it, where…
It required Illinois only ___.
There are US constitutional problems with
requiring that energy be only from Illinois,
because that violates the commerce law and
technically, although nobody’s taken that
to court.
So legislation does allow renewable energy
credits.
Those can be sometimes a lot more preferable
for several reasons.
One of it is that we’re not getting the
jobs, economic benefit and the political power
of those industries in Illinois.
But the second is that sometimes, we’re
really buying… really and preferable __
because there are other states where they’re
getting state subsidies, or if they’re building
the renewable energy, and they’re not taken
off the rack.
So we might be… you could be buying a rack
from somebody who’s already getting the
benefit of the rack from the state and that’s
really unfortunate because those are much
less expensive.
So they do allow racks, but specific tweaks
in legislation… part of it is the Illinois
power agency does ___ of renewable energy.
So they’ve been able to do these procurements,
where they had a market for that power in
Illinois.
Part of encouraging the develop in Illinois
is making sure that there is that market available,
there are those contracts available.
I don’t know that we’re going to be able
to get long term contracts that we prefer,
but at least it’s a contract and it’s
something that has to be here, rather than
piece by piece stuff.
And part of the problem is because that part,
the IPA procurement was really for ___ Ameren
customers.
And now with 650 or so municipalities aggregating,
removing over to what’s called alternative
retail electric suppliers, so that’s things
like ___ those sorts of companies, or before
your municipality aggregate, you might have
been awkward companies that will…
I’s still the same energy, it’s still
ComEd’s wires, it’s still ComEd’s stuff,
but it’s just being delivered by somebody
else.
Those customers, the ___ customers have been…
the way they have been complying has been
doing… an alternative compliance that goes
into a fund, and also self-procurement, which
is usually ___.
So the solution that we’re working towards
is changing the ratio of the alternative compliance
___ and the self-___, so there’s less self-___.
But also, making the… it’s just an accounting
issue.
Because there’s an account where the ComEd
contract money goes, there’s this account
where the ___ money goes, one account, actually
can’t even be used ____, because so many
customers are not with ComEd anymore.
it’s really making that money available
so that folks who’re building this energy
in Illinois can have stable access to it to
have this ___ market.
That’s really the solution that we’re
going towards, just the stability.
This has nothing to do even with the
production __
that we’ve gone down.
It really is our problem with the state, having
that stable market, and stable financing to
be able to build these projects.
There is a lot more environmental law and
policy center and there’s a lot more about…
so they’ve got some stuff on their website
that I would recommend going to.
But that is my best
