John Hughes reflects on DNREC career
Hughes has stepped down from his position as the state’s top environmentalist.
He said in his six years at the helm, the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) made important strides to protect the state’s natural resources, yet work remains to be done.
“You can clean the air and clean the water, but if you don’t have any wild Delaware left, no land for it to interact with, you’ll have won a series of battles and lost a major war,” Hughes said. The state has done a tremendous job acquiring tracts of land, preserving them from developers who had more money than the department had, Hughes said, but the state must continue to purchase more land.
Hughes calls land protection the core environmental problem. It will be the challenge of the incoming secretary to protect land within a shrinking budget. The contradiction, or what Hughes calls the shame of the budget dilemma, is that the state has fewer dollars to purchase land just at the time when land is cheaper to acquire.
“It is one of the toughest jobs in Delaware, because you work in a goldfish bowl. Industry is dependent upon your understanding of their capability to clean themselves up, and environmental activists want you to take a strong position,” said the Georgetown University alum during a recent interview at his Rehoboth Beach home.
Protecting the environment protects some of Delaware’s economic assets, and the job is not without its trials. Hughes said he made the best decisions he could, but he recognizes that doesn’t mean he always made the right decisions, citing a permit for a type of scrubber on a New Castle County facility that was not the best option available.
He said he thinks he has been a good negotiator for the state, dealing with people, not companies. “You can’t be a good negotiator with an inflexible stance,” he said. That may have earned some of his decisions scorn from environmentalists, but he says Delaware environmental officials are ferocious regulators.
He’s proud of the residents of Sussex County for standing up in favor of the Bluewater Wind project, which he says would have been inconceivable 10 years ago. He said he hopes Delaware will become the center of wind energy construction for the Atlantic seaboard.
Improvements at refinery
When Gov. Ruth Ann Minner appointed Hughes, she gave him a set of goals, including to complete the multi-million-dollar Indian River Marina, one of the country’s premier facilities. He said now he hopes the marina can survive the recession.
Hughes also set the department’s sights on the Delaware City Refinery, which processes high-sulfur sour crude oil. “It is one of the country’s largest refineries; it’s of vital importance. If Delaware City goes down, it’s just a matter of time before vast economic repercussions come to all of us,” he said.
Although essential, the plant was also extremely dirty. The last six years mark the greatest improvement in the facility, which Hughes said now emits less than 10 percent of the traditional pollutants, other than carbon dioxide. Good work, he said, but cleanup isn’t over yet.
Ban once-through cooling
“I’d like to see them get out of once-through cooling. I think that’s a medieval procedure; it’s very destructive to smaller forms of life,” he said. Once-through cooling in industrial centers draws in water, and whatever small animals are in it, and cycles it through the plant to cool equipment. Fish and crabs are crushed or boiled, and wildlife that gets stuck against intake screens often suffocates.
Hughes said he’s most concerned about once-through cooling systems at Indian River power plant because its negative effects are much more concentrated in the small Inland Bays ecosystem than are the effects of Delaware City on the Delaware River ecosystem.
“My opinion is all once-through cooling should be banned, but we have to have some sense of pace – we have to set goals and work by a benefit/cost analysis,” he said.
That means regulators have to make tough decisions – what needs to be addressed first – fly ash, air emissions or cooling water? They can’t all be fixed at once, he said.
Another success for Delaware was blocking a plan by British Petroleum to install docks at Crown Landing for transporting liquefied natural gas to New Jersey from Venezuela. Hughes said the department also blocked a plan to transport neutralized nerve gas from the Midwest to New Jersey, where it would be treated and discharged into the Delaware Bay. He said the scheme was shaky, and the chance of human error was too big a risk to take.
Premcor is in at Delaware City for the long haul, said Hughes, and committed to improving the facility. “They’re not environmental champions, they’re oil refiners. But, they are far more responsible than previous owners,” he said.
He analyzes power plants this way: the owners who come and go are like people who rent cars – they often don’t care much about the vehicle and will ignore many of its problems. Those owners are reluctant to invest real money into a facility without being forced to do so.
Regulators have to walk a tightrope requiring power facilities to clean up. The facilities have to be making money in order to spend it. “It’s hard to get capital improvements out of people who are going broke,” he said. State officials have to judge how much money they can get from a company for a certain project, and they have to prioritize problems.
“You can’t run them out of business; that would invite a whole suite of problems,” he said. Energy is needed everywhere, he said on a cold January day, pointing out all the heaters in southern Delaware were likely on at full tilt. That is no excuse for a laissez-faire attitude, especially for a factory in the Inland Bays.
“A coal-based plant is inherently dangerous, and it’s hard to clean up an old one,” he said. The Indian River power plant owned by NRG Energy was burning dirty coal in a dirty way, he said.
The company has made significant improvements on its air emissions, including recent mercury-control technology, but there remains a lot of cleanup work to be done, he said.
The state’s multi-pollutant regulations are some of the toughest in the country, said Hughes, and he’s proud of that achievement.
Hughes calls the Inland Bays an environmental paradise, the golden goose of Sussex County’s tourist economy.
“I lived in Chevy Chase and spent my summers in Rehoboth. My earliest memories in life are here,” said Hughes. The former Rehoboth Beach mayor and city commissioner calls the Inland Bays a paradise that is the prime economic draw for the area.
The Inland Bays have changed since the days of Hughes’s youth, when locals freely took advantage of the watershed’s bounty, harvesting crabs and fish that were there for the taking.
DNREC spent 10 years formulating a pollution control strategy to protect them from further harm and allow them to begin to repair themselves.
Hughes proudly signed the pollution control strategy in October, but it was quickly challenged in court by Sussex County and a group of private landowners. Hughes calls the move “environmental madness.”
He said he had the authority to promulgate the regulations, which is the crux of the pending litigation.
“Certain freedoms have to be lost if you want to sit on the edge of the marsh to watch the water, and I say I need a buffer,” he said. The state’s authority to act is critically important to protect a fragile resource, he said. The federal Clean Water Act mandates waterways in degraded condition be restored to meet fishable and swimmable water standards. It is not a flexible standard, Hughes said.
The state charged headlong into plans to correct the nutrient pollution that decreases water quality, but there aren’t a lot of tools available to fix such a problem, he said. Plans have been met with resistance from several camps along the way.
Buffers are recognized as the single, most effective way to combat nutrient pollution, and were touted as such by the Center for the Inland Bays as well as DNREC scientists.
“If we were defeated, it simply means to achieve Clean Water Act mandates, we go from cheaper buffer strips to much more expensive measures, as much as treating rainwater as if it was sewage. That’s the foolishness,” Hughes said, of the two pending lawsuits.
He said he sees a new population moving into Sussex County that wants to protect the environmental assets it came here for. Sussex County’s rich farmland isn’t what draws people to the area, said Hughes: it’s the bays.
He said developers are beginning to be interested in spending more money on environmentally sound developments, and more homeowners want so-called green homes.
The state has a program in the works, which Hughes set in motion, to allow developers expedited processing for projects that meet certain environmental standards.
Small named acting secretary
David Small has been acting secretary of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control since Tuesday, Jan. 20, said department spokeswoman Melinda Carl.
Small has worked with the department 21 years, since he joined as chief of the Office of Information and Education. The Camden resident served as executive assistant to the secretary and was deputy secretary from 2001 until this week, serving under former secretaries Nicholas DiPasquale and John Hughes. Small represents Delaware in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a 10-state group seeking to cap greenhouse gas emissions in the Northeast. The Randolph-Macon College alum is on The Climate Registry board of directors.
Small worked as sports editor for the Sussex County newspaper The Whale.
Hughes speaks out on beach nourishment
John Hughes’s first job with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control was running the dredging section, which later encompassed beach nourishment projects.
Working as a dredger was not Hughes’ original career plan. He planned to teach school in the area and purchase Pier Point Marina for summer work, but the deal fell through.
In Rehoboth in March and unemployed, he became an equipment operator, eventually becoming a dredge operator. When the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) dredging program began, he was hired to run it. The first project was Love Creek. Hughes said the work was brutally hard and dangerous, but he enjoyed it.
Later, the state began to replenish eroding beaches, and the dredging section managed that work. Along with beach nourishment and replenishment, Hughes said, “I think it was really important to hold the line on beach access.” People were trying to close beaches to the public, which, Hughes said, was detrimental to an economic asset.
“People are attracted to the ambiance here. People come to the area and may never go to the beaches, but they wouldn’t come here if there was no beach,” he said.
Beach nourishment is an economically viable project that costs less than it brings in. Hughes said he is proud that nourishment projects have kept Delaware’s coasts covered with wide swaths of sand for summer recreation. He and cites last year’s Mother’s Day storm which ravaged beaches, yet, he said, the sand returned by Memorial Day.
But ultimately, it is a losing battle. “The beaches are rolling back to the west,” he said, and sea level rise won’t help matters any.
…and on farmers
Hughes was appointed director of the soil and water section, which sought to revamp old projects, including drainage. While farming would not have been feasible without drainage or tax ditches, “It’s environmentally dangerous. It was wrong,” said Hughes. He said he found an opportunity to retune the drainage program and add stream functions to linear ditches carved across the state. Rocks and dams were added for aeration, in a project an Environmental Protection Agency scientist hailed as one of the best in the nation. “It took us 200 years to drain Delaware, and it will take decades to restore it,” he said.
Hughes said he is proud of the conservation districts and their outreach work. “They have helped bring Delaware agriculture into the 21st century,” he said. Delaware agriculture’s efforts on the Nutrient Management Act, which have successfully balanced agricultural nutrients to reduce runoff into waterways, are another point of pride.
Hughes said it’s a groundbreaking law, and farmers were involved in crafting the rules from the beginning. The law does not permit anonymous complaints, and when complaints against a farm are voiced, farmers are the judges of the accused. “Farmers are considered slow to change, but they are not so much slow to change as demanding of proof. They want a reason – because it’s right, because it produces results, because it is beneficial. Delaware farmers stepped right up to the plate. They are environmental heroes, in my book,” said Hughes.
