Kudos to the DEP!

There don’t seem to be too many people with good things to say about governmental entities these days.  Taxes are high while the services they are meant to fund seem to be shrinking, thus fueling a great deal of taxpayer discontent.  While we ourselves often take issue with decisions that are made by elected and appointed officials, we are pleased to have good reason to salute the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection for a step that its staffers recently took!

The Department has long offered interested parties the opportunity to review permit applications and other types of documents that are pertinent to its decision-making process.  Until a short time ago, all that information was sent out to people who requested it in hard copy format.  To our constant frustration, the Department did not utilize any type of system to select what it sent to whom – if you were on the list to receive copies of materials related to permit applications, you received information for every application under review in the State.  Even though we were really only interested in pending action in our region, we were routinely sent materials related to developments all across the state.  That used up tremendous amounts of taxpayer resources, both in terms of labor (staff time to copy, bind and mail the materials) and money (to purchase/lease and maintain the copy machines, purchase the paper upon copies were made and postage fees), not to mention the natural resources that were used to make the paper, transport the raw and finished products to the end users and ultimately, to dispose of them.  Several weeks ago, the DEP quietly made the switch to sending out electronic copies of these documents to interested parties. 

While there are obviously still expenses related to the distribution of this information, the expense to taxpayers and our natural systems is undeniably smaller.  The time it takes a staff member to distribute electronic documents pales in comparison to the time it takes to get hard copies ready for mailing, even if those documents must first be scanned.  Much of our review of the materials can be done without printing out the documents, and when we do feel the need to print something, we have the option to print just the pages of particular interest.  When we are not interested in a document that we are sent, we simply delete it from our computer files.

So, we send out a sincere pat on the back to the staff of the DEP for finally taking this step to reduce expenses while actually improving the service it provides to taxpayers!