After the federal government terminated two grants, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management struggled to align its programs with the administration’s priorities while still maintaining a commitment to initiatives such as environmental justice. ecoRI News reporter and Blab Lab host Colleen Cronin speaks with DEM director Terry Gray.

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This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Colleen Cronin

Terry, welcome to the show today. Thanks so much for coming on.

Terry Gray

Oh, it’s great to be back.

Colleen Cronin

We really appreciate having you. You know, you were on at the end of last year, before Trump was inaugurated, but after he was elected, to kind of talk about what you expected might come in the next administration. And you know, we’re talking to you as a state department head about federal changes. Just as a little refresher for our audience, can you explain sort of what role the Feds even have and how they sort of generally affect state affairs?

Terry Gray 

So generally, we have a lot of federal partner agencies at DEM. EPA is one of the big ones, obviously, but then it’s certainly not the only one. We work very closely with NOAA. We work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture through our farming programs. We also work a lot with the Department of Interior, primarily through our fish and wildlife programs.

Colleen Cronin

Oh, interesting.

Terry Gray

And about a third of our budget is provided through federal grants. So we work with EPA as co-regulators a lot of times, and with the other programs as mostly co implementers.

Colleen Cronin 

Can you explain a little bit more what you mean by co-regulators?

Terry Gray 

So what that means is we use a combination of state and federal authorities to regulate entities in the state or activities in the state to make sure that we get clean air, clean water, healthy communities and clean sites. So, a lot of what we really lean on, a lot is based in state law, but the backstop to that is always federal law. So, the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Superfund, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and hazardous waste, a lot of those things.

Colleen Cronin 

So when we spoke to you back in December, you talked a lot about the sort of potential rollbacks, the cuts in funding. And I think that we all had expectations about how the first, however many months of this administration would go, and they’ve certainly either lived up or been maybe more than what we expected. And I’m curious if you could talk about how your expectations compared to what actually happened in the last, you know, six or so months.

Terry Gray 

Well a lot has happened, it’s been a really interesting process, not always in a good way. And we’ve had two grants that were terminated, completely. One was from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for local farm assistance, and the other one was for environmental justice. Both of those were terminated. The environmental justice one was not really a surprise. We kind of knew that. The administration had sort of telegraphed that from the beginning. We’re still trying to implement the program without the funding, and still working with our community partners to make that happen. We’ve also seen quite a bit of activity with new conditions coming out on some of our grants and new certifications being required, and a lot of these are, I try to make sure that the programs are aligned with the administration’s priorities.

Colleen Cronin 

We kind of had spoken about how, you know, that sort of idea of administrations changing priorities. It’s not uncommon. Like you talked about, I think the Bush administration sort of wanted to lean away from climate change, and yet you could maybe accomplish the same work with, you know, talking about natural disaster relief and stuff like that. Is that kind of the, I don’t want to call it a game, but a situation you have to work with under these circumstances, or is it a little bit more extreme than that?

Terry Gray 

Some of that is happening. So obviously, we’re not necessarily using the words climate resilience right up front. We’re talking about natural disaster preparedness. It’s the same thing in a lot of ways. When we talk about climate change, we’re really thinking now about the co-benefits of some of the actions that we take to come back to combat climate change, and we look at some of the pollution reductions that we’d also get from that, but a lot of it is it hasn’t really got to that point yet. In terms of terminology, we’re just — there’s a lot of uncertainty right now. So we’re working with our federal partners to figure out what’s happening with them. They have a big reduction in force going on, so a lot less people to deal with in the federal agencies, and they’re also really trying to realign their grants and look at some of their funding sources.

Colleen Cronin 

Yeah, I had a question for you about whether or not it’s been a struggle to communicate with any of those federal counterparts. I had read kind of maybe a little bit earlier on in the term about people sort of trying to reach out to, you know, a certain officer within a federal office and realizing they’d been laid off, or they’d taken the buyouts or whatever. Is that something you guys were experiencing?

Terry Gray 

Well, there was a period of time at the beginning of the Trump Administration when a lot of the appointments weren’t in place yet. So, for instance, with EPA, they had not named a regional administrator yet. So, now that that regional administrator is in place, I think the staff at EPA have gotten more comfortable dealing with the new leadership. That’s also somebody that I talk to a lot. I talk to the Regional Administrator fairly often. We have a good relationship, so that communication is a lot better now than it was maybe two months ago.

Colleen Cronin 

I’m curious you said, you know, with the environmental justice grant, that that was maybe something that was more expected, but I have written a little bit about research that was sort of lost because of USDA cuts. I’m curious, did they give you a reason for why they were cutting that?

Terry Gray   

It was pretty general, the reasoning was that the program no longer was aligned with agency priorities.

Colleen Cronin   

OK, OK, gotcha.

Terry Gray   

One thing I’m very clear about when I talk to my staff is federal priorities have changed, but our priorities have not. So, we still are committed to dealing with environmental justice communities and making sure that we have equitable opportunities to take advantage of our programs, either environmental protection or natural resource programs, and we’re continuing those conversations, we’re continuing those efforts. We just can’t use federal funding for that anymore.

Colleen Cronin   

And how much were those two grants that were canceled together?

Terry Gray   

About a million dollars a piece.

Colleen Cronin   

OK. A lot of money, but I guess in the grand scheme of things?

Terry Gray   

Yeah, the agriculture, so they’re a million dollars a piece, but they’re also over three years. So it’s about $300,000 a year in each grant.

Colleen Cronin   

That got canceled? Something that I was going to ask you about, more specifically, is, I recently went to the Narragansett Bay … Is it estuary? Estuarine? Estuarine?

Terry Gray   

Estuary research.

Colleen Cronin   

The estuary Research Reserve on Prudence Island. And it was a really wonderful experience, so cool. And I went there in part, you know, because they’re a federal-state partnership, and they were concerned that maybe they wouldn’t get any federal funding, or less federal funding. When I spoke to Caitlin Chafee, the chief of the reserve, most recently, she’d said there was a little bit of optimism, some good news. And I’m just curious if you could give us an update on that.

Terry Gray   

So first of all, I love the Narragansett National Estuary Research … mouthful. We call it NBNRR.

Colleen Cronin

“Nibner,” OK.

Terry Gray

So it’s an awesome facility. They do some great work with respect to long term trends in water quality monitoring, salt marsh restoration and retreat and conditions, as well as a lot of education programs, which I thought was really cool. They do a lot of teach the teacher type things out there. It’s also going to be our first zero emissions campus.

Colleen Cronin   

Really cool. Yeah, I think I rode in one of the electric trucks that they have.

Terry Gray   

Yes, they have a Ford Lightning out there. And, you know, it gets 300 miles on a charge, and you can drive for six months on island and not go 300 miles.

Colleen Cronin   

I think it’s about 6 miles long.

Terry Gray 

But their funding is primarily through NOAA and Caitlin did an awesome job in that interview, kind of explaining to you the pros and cons and the challenges that she’s facing as the manager out there. I do think there is optimism. I do think things are settling down with NOAA and their understanding where they might have to have some reductions, and where they can continue to fund valuable programs like NBNER and things are looking OK.

Colleen Cronin 

Yeah, I think, kind of pulling back out, are there other areas that you guys, maybe in your work, are perhaps a little bit more at risk because they rely more heavily on federal funding?

Terry Gray 

Well, I mean, the really scary thing that came out was the president’s budget, and when the president’s budget was announced, a lot of core programs, things like clean air, clean water, site, cleanup brownfields, they were all, they were all basically zeroed out as grants. There’s a whole category of federal grants called state and tribal assistance grants, and those are the bread and butter of what we do to protect the environment.I don’t think that that’s going to be the final say from Congress, but the President’s budget is a pretty strong policy statement. And then Congress reacts to that, and they look at the past year’s funding, they look at what’s produced out of a program, the value added, and then they fund it accordingly. Those grants have all been pretty much flat for a long period of time. Any kind of reduction, any significant reduction, would be pretty devastating. So we’re nervous, but we’re also kind of in a wait and see mode to see how it plays out.

Colleen Cronin 

Yeah, and I’m curious, you know, from your perspective as a you know, department head, state department head, how do you try to advocate for yourself on that federal level, like you’re already, before we hopped on and started recording and talking about, you know, it’s busy session on the state level. Are you working with the congressional delegation? How do you sort of advocate for yourself on that federal level?

Terry Gray

So one of the things that we do is I work very closely with my counterparts in other states, and I’ll work regionally with the other New England environmental agency directors, and we’ll coordinate primarily with the regional leaders of our federal partner agencies. But we also coordinate on a national level. And it’s interesting, because when you roll this up to a national level, you quickly see that these kinds of budget challenges are not red state versus blue state things. It impacts everybody, and when you’re talking about some of the other states, some of the other states rely on federal funding much more than we do, and they’re really going to be hurt. So there’s a lot of advocacy for this in a bipartisan way that the states actually implement probably over 95% of these federal cleanup programs, and we need to keep that success happening.

Colleen Cronin 

We just spoke a lot about funding, but another really big part of the federal government’s involvement that you just mentioned earlier was about regulating clean air, clean water. And we’d spoken in December a little bit about concern about rollbacks for you know, for things that the Environmental Protection Agency regulates. Contaminants, things like that. What are we seeing there?

Terry Gray 

Oh, yeah. So a lot of the effort and a lot of the attention so far has been on clean air. And the most distressing thing we’ve seen was Congress taking action to really remove the Clean Air Act authorities that allowed us to promulgate the Advanced Clean Cars II, and Advanced Clean Trucks regulations. And it wasn’t just Rhode Island. There’s like 17 states that are impacted by this, of course, California, but other states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, big states that represent a big part of the US economy. So, we’re all coordinating, trying to figure out what next. And there’s litigation that’s already started to challenge that congressional action and to really, hopefully, restore that element in the Clean Air Act that allows us to take measures to prevent carbon emissions. A lot of our efforts to meet the mandates in the Rhode Island Act on Climate will depend on that.

Colleen Cronin 

I was going to ask if that was sort of impacting our greater goals?

Terry Gray 

It is definitely. We were on a pretty good trajectory with respect to EV transition and our fleet, and most of that was voluntary because those regulations hadn’t taken effect yet.

Colleen Cronin

Can you remind me and any listeners about what exactly advanced clean cars and advanced clean trucks, what those regulations were or are?

Terry Gray 

So we’ll start with Advanced Clean Cars, and it’s Advanced Clean Cars II, actually. What it does is it provides a schedule, starting with model year 2027 and going through model year 2035, which requires the manufacturers to provide more and more electric vehicles to Rhode Island dealers. And the regulations actually are focused at the manufacturers, not the dealers, and they don’t impact customers at all. But by 2035, the goal was that the manufacturers would provide 100% electric vehicles to the dealers in Rhode Island. In the Advanced Clean Trucks, it’s a little less aggressive, primarily because the technologies are not as advanced as with light duty and passenger vehicles, but it would start a schedule that would require more and more electric trucks over time.

Colleen Cronin 

So we’ve talked about funding, we’ve talked about regulation. I think the other big component is research that gets impacted by federal changes. Has any DEM related research been impacted by the Trump administration?

Terry Gray 

Well, it’s kind of a two-prong thing. We do a little research on our own. For instance, we do a lot of troll surveys.

Colleen Cronin

Mhmm.

Terry Gray 

What these trawl surveys do is create a time series data set of what type of fish are in our hands at bay, and they run the same exact transom across the bay every time and then, and then that becomes a valuable trend analysis of what’s happening out there. A lot of that’s funded by NOAA. So if that funding gets jeopardized, that’s going to really hurt our ability to keep that data set going. We also partner very closely with URI, to a little lesser extent Brown University, but they do a lot of good kinds of primary research on a lot of the topics that we work on. For instance, URI has extensive research going on right now on PFAs, and, and we’ve worked very closely with them on that, and it’s provided some really good insights into how to regulate PFAs in Rhode Island. Hopefully, that’ll continue.

Colleen Cronin 

Yeah, and I wonder, you know, I think something that I hear when I talk to scientists, is just that these efforts, even if they don’t necessarily target your specific science or your specific research, although it seems that all types of science are being targeted right now, there’s sort of something happening fundamentally, where perhaps the United States isn’t going to be a research center anymore, or perhaps certain research that’s basic and fundamental isn’t going to happen. And I’m wondering, you know, how that kind of bigger picture question of what happens with science here how that impacts DM, maybe more in the long term.

Terry Gray 

So that, that’s a scary concept, because, when I start talking about research, I’m really talking about the data that we collect from the research, but there’s people behind that data, and there’s graduate students, there’s professors, there’s some pretty powerful minds that are really thinking about how to do this and what concepts that we should be looking into. And if those folks aren’t funded, or their work isn’t funded, that creates an immediate problem, but it also sends a chill down, kind of like the pipeline of talent that people might not want to get into anymore. And that’s scary, because that could have lasting impacts on the development of our science and what we know about some of these, these new topics.

Colleen Cronin 

Oh, dear. You know we talked that money t has an impact on all this. The president’s budget obviously could have, if it, even if it’s changed a bit, could have a big impact. But we’re also on the state level, facing a deficit, which we’ve talked about before. How does that kind of play into this whole situation?

Terry Gray 

Well, first of all, I will say that I’m very grateful that the DEM budget this year is essentially a current services budget. So we haven’t had to take any cutbacks or shrinkage at all during the budget discussions, and with the overall environment, financial environment that we sometimes see, I’m super grateful for that. Moving forward, there’s some big issues on the table. So it could not only be challenges to our federal funding, but if there are other challenges in the state budget that have kind of a trickle down effect or a spread effect across state government that could impact us as well. So we’re, we’re watching that, and, you know, obviously the elected officials are all very aware of that as well. But like I said earlier, we’re kind of in a wait and see mode. Sometimes you hear some very frightening early statements and signals, and then a dialog happens. And eventually the dust clears, and things aren’t quite as bad as what you thought they would be when you first heard that statement come out. So I think, there are some good dialogues going on right now. There’s a lot of learning going on with new people in the federal administration, and  they’re seeing where the value is in a lot of places, and I think they’ll see that there’s a lot of value in state environmental programs.

Colleen Cronin

Just kind of a more procedural question, you know, we’re finalizing the state budget and then, kind of waiting to See what happens on the federal level. If there’s drastic changes to federal funding, what happens? Do we go back to the drawing board? Or …

Terry Gray

Maybe, I don’t know. We haven’t been to that place before. I think if it’s really drastic and major adjustments need to be made, then the administration and the General Assembly are gonna have to work through that.

Colleen Cronin

Yeah, yeah. Maybe it’ll be a special session. You know, we talked a lot about the negatives, and that’s, you know, what I’m reading a lot about. And certainly from an environmental perspective, I honestly think that there are a lot of negatives from this administration, but I’m curious you know, are there positives coming out of regulations, funding to different things, more research on certain things? I wonder if there’s anything that’s been helping to advance DEM’s goals coming out of this administration.

Terry Gray 

So, it’s still early, OK? And it’s government, so things don’t always move as fast as you would think, but I can tell you that meeting the new regional administrator and developing a relationship with him, I think, has been important. That’s a positive thing. He’s been to Rhode Island three times. I’ve met with him other times, up in Boston and around Massachusetts. He came down, he took a look at the Centredale Manor Superfund Site, and got very engaged and wanted to know what he could do to advance progress towards clean up. That’s a positive thing. He came down and visited the Meeting Street School, which is an amazing success story in terms of brownfields, and looked at that campus and was really impressed there. He spent a lot of time in Newport talking to our water program directors about water pollution and clean water programs. I think there’s that education and sort of relationship building that’s going on right now. And the more you know somebody, the more that you can deal with them face to face, I think it kind of takes away some of the rhetoric and the impersonal sort of challenges that come with just these blanket statements.

Colleen Cronin

Not that you have a crystal ball, but if you did, what do you think is coming in the next six months, in this first year of the administration?

Terry Gray

That’s a tough one. I think we’re going to have a lot of discussions about where the Clean Air program is going, and that’s going to it’s not just a Rhode Island thing, that’s a regional thing, that’s a national thing. So we’ll be talking a lot about how that’s happening. I think on the state side, we still got our mandates and our goals on the Act on Climate, so our climate planning work is going to continue, and we’re going to have to chart a path to 2030 probably without a lot of involvement from our federal partners. So, we’ll have to see how that plays out. Same thing with resilience. So, you know, I can’t end without talking about resilience, because now more than ever, climate change is going to happen, and we’re going to be dealing with sea level rise, storm surge, more intense weather events. So we gotta get Rhode Island ready for that.

Colleen Cronin 

Thank you so much, Terry, for talking about all this, for coming on the show. I know it’s a really busy time.

Terry Gray 

Oh, it’s always a pleasure. Thank you.