SR 3481 passes, What do you think?

SR3481 passes the House and Senate at the end of the lame duck session of congress.  Basically what this means is there will be money that will come from taxes to pay for a government entity to go around and make sure owners, contractors, and everyone else maintain specific regulation outlined in the Clean Air and Water Act.  With the passage of this bill, municipalities can increase their revenue on the collection of storm water pollution fees.  This means they can do more for regulatory compliance and enforcement against these federally funded agencies.  Increasing regulatory ability translates into more business for members who are consultants, storm water plan writers, contractors and BMP installers.

This is all fantastic stuff right?  Let us reflect on what it exactly says and think about just the last five years.  Take the top 10 contractors or builders in the country and combine the amount of fines they have paid in due to non compliance of federal regulations.  During those five years any of the “federal” construction jobs, whether it be a post office or a prison, could disregard what others paid top dollar for.  Now for an added comfort to all taxpaying Americans, we will now be taxed extra so the same officials that have been, rightly in many instances, fining owners for being out of compliance.

I have a question over all of this. Hopefully the rest of the privately owned construction community has a question over all of this as well. Shouldn’t the federal projects be in compliance regardless?  Shouldn’t those who write the law, who regulate the law, be above all and be in compliance?  Why, over just the last 5 years, have there been so many fines given to the private industry and these federal projects are being overlooked?  Don’t be confused by this bill.  While it does add money to an industry that a lot of people are in, including me, it is the wrong approach.  My idea is to choose qualified contractors who have more than just the lowest nickel and dime number.  The idea behind all of this is to protect the planet, right?  Clean air, clean water?  That all sounds important to me!  I would rather pay a dollar up front to have the right plan in place instead of paying $4.99 to go to another program that may or may not work.(numbers are sarcasm not exact)  Fixing this can all be done by educating the uneducated, teaching the people how important something is as simple as throwing your gum wrapper in the trash instead of out your car window.  Storm water runoff is a problem everywhere.  If the right techniques are used to control erosion, the need for controlling sediment is greatly decreased.  So simple but yet now we have another tax. 

While yes, I do think it is great that there is being money pumped into our industry, I believe there are much better ways to accomplish this.  We do not need this to excite the consultants, storm water plan writers, contractors and BMP installers.   We all should be excited to the fact that there are laws in place that have been in place to protect each other, our families, our friends.   We also can be happy that now all the federal jobs that go on in many neighborhoods around America will now have to abide by the same rules that the private citizen has.  What do you think?