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f e a t u r e Waiting on a Plan A new binational environmental plan for the U.S.-Mexico border has been
slow to materialize under the year-old administrations of President George
W. Bush and President Vicente Fox. But its formation picked up momentum
in January, as officials focussed attention on the area. Strong federal support remains critical to improving the environment along the U.S.-Mexico border, according the Good Neighbor Environmental Board (GNEB), which authored the report. "Pollution, congestion, and scarce water supplies continue to plague large portions of our nation's southern border," said Board Chair Judith Espinosa at a Washington, D.C. news conference to release the report. "Protecting the health of community residents and the fragile ecosystems that surround them must remain a federal priority. Not only will the border region benefit, so will the entire nation," she added. The 10-year-old board consists of representatives from eight federal agencies and the four U.S. states bordering on Mexico. This most recent report of five was delivered in wake of recommendations the U.S. EPA announced just over a week earlier on Jan. 11 that call for leaving more control of border environmental planning in the hands of tribal, state, county and city jurisdictions. Those recommendations are contained in the U.S.-Mexico Border XXI Program: Progress Report 1996-2001 and constitute the most current roadmap for charting the environmental plan that will replace Border XXI. The Border XXI plan was a five-year binational framework for coordination of environmental policies in the border region, adopted by the United States and Mexico in 1996. Border area stakeholders, who have been the leading voices advocating a plan that gives them more say-so in environmental decisionmaking, welcomed the conclusions of the GNEB report, which, if heeded would result in distribution of more federal funding to lower jurisdictions, spurring the desired restructuring. "U.S. tax dollars can and should be used" on both sides of the border to address environmental impacts of free trade, said Mark Spalding, lecturer on International Environmental Policy and Law at UC-San Diego. Wanted: Redoubled SupportBorder XXI Program participants note that federal funding for border environmental planning has dwindled since the early years of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), adversely affecting the coffers of local governments confronting trade-driven growth and degradation. It's been more than a year since the Southwest Center for Environmental Resource and Policy (SCERP) told Washington it should re-establish the border environment as a priority. In Protecting the Environment of the U.S.-Mexico Border Area: A Briefing Paper for the Incoming U.S. Administration, published in December 2000, SCERP stated: "Since the conclusion of debate over NAFTA, the border area's prominence on the national stage has steadily decreased, despite increased trade and growth-much of it attributable to the rise in U.S.-Mexico commerce that benefits the entire nation. "Border XXI, the mechanism for responding to environmental problems in the region, has neither a dedicated EPA staff nor a dedicated programmatic budget-and its funding for the border has been trending downward," it added. Detailing the impact of that reality, SCERP noted: "States, localities, and tribes are dependent on the funds EPA is able to provide. Throughout the second half of the 1990s, 70-85% of EPA border funds consists of state and tribal grants. "The administration could make a high-level commitment to the border environment, ensuring that federal, state, and tribal programs for protecting the border's environment at all levels are adequately staffed and funded. Other sectors which impact the environment -- energy, housing, education, transport -- are outside this paper's scope; nevertheless, the administration could give attention to these sectors on the border, as well." In a book set to be published this year by the Regents of the University of California, Transboundary Environmental Management Issues Facing Mexico and the United States, Spalding forwards basic arguments which support calls to inject more federal money into the border area. "The border region is a trade zone of national concern. U.S. interests own a significant majority of maquiladoras and other business investments in the region. In other words, this is a region of economic importance to the nation which should be 'managed' accordingly," Spalding writes in the book's chapter entitled "Improving Institutional Response to Environmental Problems". He continues, "the low wage production center at the border benefits all U.S. consumers. However, the tax base of border communities is too small for current needs, much less for the provision of infrastructure for projected growth. The result is that border communities are unable to generate enough in tax revenues to support the governmental entities that implement and manage environmental infrastructure systems for potable water, sewage collection, wastewater treatment, or solid waste management." Wanted: Both Infrastructure and Planning Structure Those infrastructure projects are the big-ticket item in public environmental spending at the border, and the two binational sister institutions in charge of them, the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission (BECC) and the North American Development Bank (NADB), have attracted attention over the past two years, as the U.S. and Mexican governments seek to make those institutions more effective. Cases in point are a November 2000 BECC-NADB mandate expansion and a current binational probe of the agencies ordered by presidents Fox and Bush in September. But besides infrastructure funding, more money is needed to help establish a structure for overall environmental planning program on the border, an effort that carries a lower price tag yet which is key to successful cooperation. "It's really where the rubber meets the road-where the states, federal government, academics, NGOs, [and] businesses get together in cooperation for day-to-day management of environmental problems," says Lawrence Sperling, EPA attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. "So it's every bit as important as the infrastructure." SCERP's briefing paper stated that the nine thematic working groups established under the Border XXI Program would continue to function at least until a new structure for a binational environment plan is established. The paper also reflected arguments from other sectors that the next border environmental plan reorganize responsibilities so that U.S. and Mexican "sister-states would each have their own regional working groups for managing the environmental issues that most affect them in their localities, a restructuring that the January EPA program report deemed advisable. "Although Border XXI has reached important achievements, the governments of both countries recognize that there are still ample possibilities for improvement in several areas," a draft of the report noted. "An important step toward guaranteeing greater progress is the inclusion of the state, local and tribal governments, as well as the general public...residents, non-governmental and private organizations on the border," it said. Wanted: Action In fact, members of the current Border XXI environmental health, law enforcement, and air working groups are continuing to meet along the established thematic lines. Meanwhile, the problem of reconfiguring working groups along geographic lines without losing control of broader problems that impact the entire border is the first challenge that must be met in order for a new plan to take shape. The GNEB report recommended that the themes of the past administration continue to be given continued priority in the new plan, but with particular emphasis on the issues of water resources, air quality, and hazardous materials. So far the plan doesn't even have a name. But in addition to U.S. signals last month, its formulation received some impetus when Mexican federal authorities from the Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (SEMARNAT) held a meeting with Mexico's six border state representatives in mid-January. Now planners from the various jurisdictions on both sides of the border are expecting to meet altogether in March. Once they hash out an acceptable structure, they hope to get on with the business of generating an initial flexible framework document to guide the administrations-but it's hard telling how soon they'll get around to it, notes Sperling. "We'd like to have it done tomorrow, but we have to deal with the negotiating reality and at least 12 governments-two federal and 10 state," he says. "If I were to say we're going to have it done this year, I'd be afraid the goal could be frustrated." December reform of Mexico's federal environmental law extends more powers to states, as well as municipal governments, and the question of municipalities' form of involvement in the Border XXI successor plan is an unresolved matter, but the parties generally agree that the new scheme will involve more input from all stakeholders. SEMARNAT Secretary Victor Lichtinger promised at a border meeting with EPA Administrator Christine Whitman in Ciudad Juárez on Oct. 4, 2001 to assist in the process of meeting new geographic working groups' program needs. For her part, Whitman said the two countries agreed on principles for giving local communities greater leeway in setting priorities in the upcoming border plan. The same day, during a stakeholders meeting at a Ciudad Juárez wastewater treatment plant built with U.S. funding support, they hinted at some of their own priorities for the border environmental plan. Among these: public access to information, water provision, waste treatment, and children's health. And both stated they would pay close attention to encouraging the kind of industrial development that is not water intensive. Said Whitman: "Economic prosperity and environmental protection must go hand in hand here in the border region." [1] Wanted: Realistic Scope The scope of the new plan remains a major nagging issue. Border XXI's main objective was "to encourage sustainable development." But in the end, participants found they were unable go much beyond stopgap measures to clean up pollution. So now they are in doubt about whether goals in the new plan should be scaled back to a less ambitious level. Here's how they put it in their draft report: "The central goal of the Border XXI Program was defined in terms of encouraging sustainable development in the border region through the search for a balance between economic and social factors and environmental protection in border communities and natural areas. "One of the limitations of fomenting sustainable development through the working groups' activities was that they were directed only at certain aspects. The working groups' efforts focussed on analyzing and remediating problems of environment, natural resources and public health [that were] the product of unsustainable previous practices. Sustainable development, however, implies forming strategies that prevent future repetition of existing problems and anticipate totally new problems." To make matters worse, after admittedly failing to reach their goals during the growth period covered by the Border XXI Program, planners now confront a very different panorama: a major economic slump in both countries, which will force them to deal with the impacts of the boom-and-bust syndrome that has engulfed the border. GNEB's Espinosa acknowledged this in a cover letter to the board's report stating, "Given the continual changes and new pressures the region faces, we also advise that resources be made available to enable new partnerships to get under way to address these additional challenges." Says Environmental Attaché Sperling, "All this work in Border XXI has built cooperation, which has led to specific instances of pollution reduction. However, it's been in the face of massive growth in the region, we haven't been able to weigh our progress effectively against growth, and now we've got a new situation with economic downturn and the unique environmental challenges that's going to pose." Talli Nauman is editor-at-large for the IRC's Americas Program.
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