This story caught my eye , It was a good read. Quid Pro Quo
Read Full story here
http://www.pressherald.com/news/Whose-interests-is-Maines-DEP-commissioner-serving.htmlFor two years, public servant Patricia Aho has overseen Maine's environmental protection. But whom does she really serve? A seven-month investigation by the Telegram points to her former corporate clients.
When full, it is the state's fifth largest freshwater body, nurturing a local tourist economy and providing boating and swimming opportunities for thousands of residents and others visiting Maine. But on days like this -- when the dam owner opens the sluiceways of the Long Falls Dam to generate power farther downstream -- the lake begins to disappear, leaving behind thousands of acres of muddy and largely lifeless bottom. Docks are left high and dry and shorefront homes, camps and parks become isolated behind hundreds of yards of exposed, foul-smelling muck.
"They're killing our area up here," says Jay Wyman, a longtime selectman in Eustis, where many families moved in 1950 when the newly completed dam drowned their nearby hometowns of Flagstaff and Dead River. People in the Eustis region fought for nearly a decade to defend their livelihoods, property values and tax base by pressuring state authorities to require the dam owner to keep the lake fuller in summer and early fall as part of its federal relicensing, which comes up for review only three or four times each century. They'd sparred with the longtime owner, Florida Power & Light, from the hearing rooms of Augusta to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
By the summer of 2011, it looked like they would win -- until the state's top environmental official stepped in.
That's when the state commissioner of environmental protection, Patricia Aho -- who just months before had been working as a lobbyist for the law firm which represented the Florida power company -- met with Matthew Manahan, who was FPL's attorney and Aho's former colleague at Pierce Atwood, the state's largest law firm. After the meeting, Aho's department quietly did exactly what FPL hoped it would: nothing.
Despite detailed briefings from staff experts and a last-minute warning from the Attorney General's Office, the DEP quietly let the clock run out, missing a critical federal deadline to influence what happens at the dam for another quarter-century.
Her spokeswoman would later claim it had been an oversight, suggesting staff had dropped the ball when, internal documents and interviews with former staff reveal, the ball had been taken from them and handed to Pierce Atwood's client for an easy layup.
It is not an isolated incident.
A seven-month Maine Sunday Telegram investigation has found that commissioner Aho has acted against a range of consumer protection, pollution reduction and climate preparedness laws she had previously tried but failed to stop from passing the Legislature as a lobbyist for chemical, drug, oil and automobile companies. Present and former department employees say they have been pressured not to vigorously implement or enforce these laws, which were long opposed by companies represented by the commissioner's former law firm.
Gov. Paul LePage has pledged to make the state more business-friendly and to reduce red tape. But in many cases, the
Department of Environmental Protection has been scuttling laws in ways that benefit Aho's old clients or those of past and present clients of another lobbyist embedded in his office: Ann Robinson, a top lobbyist at the Preti Flaherty law firm, who moonlights as the governor's regulatory reform adviser and has drafted and promoted policies that would benefit her clients.
