Q&A with DEM’s Terry Gray: Listener Questions Answered
October 10, 2024
ecoRI News reporter and Blab Lab host Colleen Cronin poses listener questions to Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management director Terry Gray. Their wide-ranging discussion covers Aquapalooza to plastics recycling.
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This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Colleen Cronin
Welcome to the Blab Lab, a podcast from reporters of ecoRI News, where we unpack the critical environmental issues facing southern New England. I’m reporter Colleen Cronin, and I’m here today with Blab Lab regular and Department of Environmental Management director Terry Gray. On today’s episode, we’re going to have Terry answer questions submitted by our listeners. Hey, Terry, thanks for coming on the show today.
Terry Gray
Hi. How’s it going?
Colleen Cronin
Good, good. Thank you so much for coming on again. OK, so people had a wide range of questions, so we’re going to just hop right in. The first is one we’ve been talking a lot about, especially in the last legislative session: housing. Someone wrote in with some concern about how housing developments in suburbs are being put up, perhaps at the cost of chopping down trees and forests. And this is something I’ve heard a lot, especially when I’m talking about that balance between development and conservation. And I’m just curious, you know, are you finding that that’s the case, that there are people calling you guys and saying, “Hey, can you look at this project? Is it coming at the cost of a forest?” And are you finding there needs to be a more of a focus on that balance for these projects?
Terry Gray
Now, that’s a great question. I’m glad that that the reader sent that in. There’s a lot of pressure on land right now in Rhode Island, housing is a big one. Renewable energy projects are a big one. Conservation is always a big one, and economic development has also been a big one. So, we only have so much land, right? Rhode Island’s a small place. It’s densely populated, and the demand on the land that’s left is extreme. Now, most of the time we hear about the conflict between clearing land and building out ground-mounted solar. That was a big deal. There’s been legislative actions that really focus on solar siting and trying to save some of our core forests. It really hasn’t come up as much in the housing context. What we do a lot of is the permitting side. We do subdivision permits; we do a lot of septic system permits, and we also do wetlands permits. So anytime there’s housing that’s built in an area near a wetland, then we have jurisdiction over that.
Colleen Cronin
Yeah. And then, is there any sort of, you know, conservation development? Is that something you guys try to encourage?
Terry Gray
We don’t have the authority to force somebody to do conservation development. But a lot of the cities and towns really encourage it, and we encourage it a lot. It makes a lot of sense, because you can get that environmental protection, environmental conservation and housing development from the same piece of land, which is a positive.
Colleen Cronin
And then, kind of off of that question, a listener asked, “Do local zoning and planning officials and board members get wetlands training from the state?”
Terry Gray
Yes, and no. If you look back a couple of years, you’ll know that the Wetlands Protection Act was amended by the General Assembly, and there was a big tradeoff that was brokered in that legislation, where the single wetland standard for the state would be vested with DEM, and it would be a bit more protective than it was before the legislation passed, but the tradeoff piece of that was that the various municipalities did not have the authority to regulate wetlands beyond that. So, what we we’ve done many years after the legislation passed, we promulgated the regulations, and three years ago, we went through a pretty extensive process to update the regulations. There was a lot of drama and a lot of stress about that. People were nervous about the change, but we navigated it pretty well and have ended up in a pretty good spot now. When those regulations were amended, we did a series of workshops for municipal planners, municipal DPW directors, the builders association, consultants, everybody that works on the program, for the most part, and those workshops are all available online right now as videos. So even though we don’t have a formal training program, we have the training resources that are available to people.
Colleen Cronin
So were those trainings for local officials and stakeholders funded by the legislation? Or was that just something you had to incorporate because that cost money?
Terry Gray
No, it wasn’t funded separately. It was an investment that I think our water quality and our wetlands people really thought was worth it, and we spent a lot of time working with the builders and the municipalities in particular to make sure everybody understood the new rules.
Colleen Cronin
Would you be supportive of having a more regular training service for those officials?
Terry Gray
I think so, if it wasn’t too frequent, because it would take people away from the day-to-day business of reviewing permits and protecting wetlands.
Colleen Cronin
OK, moving on to our next question, a question I’m not sure that you can answer, but I’m going to ask anyway. Is DEM looking into buying Sweet’s Hill? And for listeners who don’t know, it’s a 150-acre property in Burrillville that the Burrillville Land Trust has been trying to raise money to buy for many, many, many years now.
Terry Gray
So, I’m happy to say yes, we are. We have gone to the state properties commission and state properties committee and gotten approval to move forward with that property. There’s a closing schedule. We typically work with a lot of partners to put together the money to buy these things. We don’t have this giant stack of money that that’s just waiting there to acquire properties, but we do have the connections and the ability to pull together partners to put together a deal. And again, most all the times that we’re working on a property like this, to conserve a property like this, the owner of the property has that intention in mind. They want to preserve it, and that helps in a lot of ways.
Colleen Cronin
I hear money being a bit of a challenge. But is there anything else that you’d say, you know, is the biggest obstacle in trying to get these acquisitions accomplished?
Terry Gray
No, I think putting together the funding is the biggest obstacle.
Colleen Cronin
Yeah? Well, that’s exciting to hear about. OK, so another listener wanted to know — switching gears a little bit — does Rhode Island have anything like Massachusetts’ Title V program, which is, for listeners who don’t know, it requires sellers to upgrade septic systems before selling their house. Can you explain if you know what might be comparable in Rhode Island?
Terry Gray
The good news about cesspools is we have a pretty good system right now to phase out cesspools, and it’s designed to phase them out over time, and it comes in two parts. One part calls for the phaseout of cesspools that were in close proximity to water bodies, and those cesspools were supposed to be phased out within a certain period of time. Admittedly, not all of them were, so then a few years later, the General Assembly passed another law, which is analogous to Title V in Massachusetts, which is referred to as the point-of-sale law. In this law, what it calls for is when a person buys a house with a cesspool, within a year, the cesspool must be replaced with a more modern septic system. Ultimately, over time, those poor-performing cesspools will be phased out and replaced with more modern systems.
Colleen Cronin
And do you have any idea of maybe how many cesspools we have left in the state, or where we’re at progress-wise on that?
Terry Gray
Making a call on how many cesspools we have is kind of tough. There are thousands of them, but the good news is we are tracking the replacement of these, and we’re getting about 600 to 700 replaced a year. And as the real estate market heats up, that’s when the action happens.
Colleen Cronin
Next question is from Janet Curlin. She asked, “Why must residents recycle plastic at the curbside? If the state can’t find someone to buy them, aren’t we just wasting water by rinsing them? What about curbside compost collecting?” So, I know that a lot of the responsibility when it comes to waste and recycling is on the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation. But I’m curious, what if any work DEM is doing to address some of these waste streams in the state and do you have any thoughts on also a statewide compost program?
Terry Gray
Well, there’s a few things to unpack in that question. So, the first one is about recycling plastics. When you look at all the material that goes into your recycling bin, there’s different markets for each one of those materials. So, aluminum has a market; plastic has a market. Paper has a market, and glass sometimes has a market. It’s my understanding that plastic has one of the strongest markets. So, the plastic that’s being put into the recycling bins is going up to the materials recycling facility, or MRF, at the landfill and sort it out, and then Resource Recovery puts those back on the market where they can be they can be used again as a new feedstock for a product. That’s working fine. There are types of plastics that are just not recyclable yet, especially hard plastic. Now, organics are very recyclable, and we like to take organics, and by that, I mean waste food, leafing and yard waste that can be composted. So we are trying to develop models for curbside collection of compostable materials, and really look at the markets to build capacity for the facilities that can do that kind of work. A lot of it’s done at farms right now. And then there’s one facility in Johnston, which is called an anaerobic digester. It’s like an industrial-scale composting facility.
Colleen Cronin
It’s a small state and it seems like space is part of the challenge there. So, the next question is from Michael Lombardi, who had a question on Aquapalooza, which I’ve also written about before. He said there are permanent mooring fields throughout Narragansett Bay, which are already seasonally off-limits to shellfishing. Why is the event Aquapalooza — which, for listeners who don’t know, is sort of like a big gathering of a lot of boats — not encouraged to take place adjacent to an existing mooring field or in areas where shellfishing is already prohibited?
Terry Gray
So that’s a tricky one, Colleen. And the bottom line is, Aquapalooza is not an organized event. It’s kind of a flash event, right? So, people will put out notices that it’s going to happen on social media, and there’s no real organizer. So, we don’t like to encourage that kind of type of event. So, we’re not really going to weigh in in terms of organizing.
Colleen Cronin
It’s like you don’t want to put parameters on where it’s going to be, because perhaps it’s not something you even want to sanction to begin with.
Terry Gray
Exactly. I think that’s pretty accurate. Now, some of the participants could certainly step up and provide a place, or suggest a place that has less of an environmental impact like a mooring field.
Colleen Cronin
Are there ever instances where individuals end up getting fined for things they do during Aquapalooza?
Terry Gray
Well, there’s an enforcement presence out there. And it’s primarily done by the Portsmouth harbormaster, but our division of law enforcement will also go over there if they get calls and incidents happen. So, there’s some level of enforcement out there. Usually, Aquapalooza happens at the same time as the Newport Folk Festival. So, our resources are really stretched thin on the water.
Colleen Cronin
OK, I think this is our last question. One reader asked us about marine cloud brightening, which, to my understanding, is sort of the idea of, you shoot something out into the sky, and it puts a cloud out there, and then the cloud helps reflect light back into space. And so it’s supposed to help the planet cool. I was just wondering if you’ve heard any talk about doing this in Rhode Island, and I’m guessing if we did do it here, there’d probably be some sort of permitting process, and I’m guessing DEM would probably be responsible for it.
Terry Gray
Your guesses are probably true. The good news is, we really haven’t heard of that kind of thing here in Rhode Island. There are a lot of macro, theoretical approaches to fighting climate change, or really kind of reengineering our environment. And that is complicated, right? The environment is a very complex system. So you start messing with one piece, and there could be ramifications on other pieces, so you have to be very, very careful. I don’t think that that can effectively be done at the scale of Rhode Island. It’s a bigger picture type approach in a lot of ways. Yeah, so, no, we really haven’t been considering that or really looking into that.
Colleen Cronin
Thank you so much, Terry for coming on the show, and thank you to our listeners for following along. We also want to thank Vanessa Carlton for letting us use her song “Willows” for our theme song. We record the Blab Lab at LitArtsRI, and it’s edited by our publisher, Jo Detz, who also mixes the episode. If you have any questions, ideas or tips for future podcasts, you can email me at [email protected]. Until next time you can get more Rhody environmental news at our website.
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Gee, wish I’d known about this because I have a question for Terry Gray that’s been asked over and over and over again in the course of ecori’s reporting since its inception: When is DEM going to re-fund and reestablish the Natural Heritage Program?