News out of Michigan's capital today is that a State Senate committee has voted to merge the Department of Environmental Quality back into the Department of Natural Resources, from which it was cleaved by former Governor John Engler, a Republican, in 1995. Ironies abound. The Republican-dominated Senate is taking the exact opposite position that a similarly constituted Senate did in 1995, when conservation and environmental advocates urged the agencies be kept as one. The other peculiarity is that the Senate committee is doing what Governor Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, promised to do when she was running for the office in 2002 but has not done. The public probably cares little how many agencies are involved with conservation or what their names are -- but in the long run a single agency is simply more efficient. It would be good to have aquatic biologists in fisheries programs talking to water quality permit engineers again.
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