Pentagon weighing environmental priorities: deputy undersecretary Woodley concerned about stability in cleanup program.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The Defense Department will revamp its approach to environmental stewardship, in an effort to reduce the contamination caused by weapon manufacturing and to lower the costs of waste removal at military installations, without undermining military readiness.

The plan is to adopt more commercial practices in the management of weapon programs and installations, said John Paul Woodley Jr., assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for the environment. He said the Pentagon increasingly will focus on "good environmental management.

During the Clinton administration, the Pentagon's environmental accounts reached about $5 billion a year. Spending is now down by more than half, which means that the military services are more hard-pressed than ever to reduce the cost of cleaning up their facilities, experts said.

Woodley said that commercial industry could teach the Defense Department some useful lessons when it comes to environmental management. "The fact that you have to pay good money at the end to dean [things] up is not good management," Woodley told National Defense.

Before coming to the Pentagon, Woodley was Virginia's secretary of natural resources. Previously, he had been an Army lawyer at the Judge Advocate General's Corps.

Within the Pentagon's environmental office, he noted, the latest buzzword is EMS, or environmental management systems. EMS is defined as a "systematic approach to make compliance with environmental laws simpler, less costly, and a routine part of mission planning and execution.

In the private sector, Woodley noted, "very hard-headed, dear-eyed business professionals are doing [EMS], because they know it will improve their efficiency and make their enterprise more profitable." The Defense Department is not a profit-malting operation, he added, "but it should not be in the business of wasting the taxpayers' money either."

Woodley conceded, however, that the environmental program has been affected by funding instability in recent years. The fiscal year 2003 budget for his office is about $2.1 billion. Of that amount, $1.3 billion is for environmental restoration. This pays fur the identification, investigation and deanup of contamination resulting from past military activities. Each service receives a share of the funding.

"The administration has strongly supported our cleanup efforts and goals," he said. "The services have budgeted very aggressively to meet those goals or to get as dose to meeting them as humanly possible." Most recently, he added, "we are seeing small increases."

The ups and downs in the environmental accounts do not help, he noted. "When you have that kind of budgeting, the managers do not know what to expect from year to year, they do not know whether they should give that activity priority."

Given the realities of annual defense appropriations, he noted, "you can turn a program on and off like water from a spigot. [But you can't] expect to run an efficient and stable program."

Having a stable program over time can help managers establish long-term goals, he said.

A long-term vision and a strategic environmental plan will help the Pentagon solve many of its environmental problems, said Rebecca Patton, a senior associate with Booz Alien & Hamilton, a defense contractor that works on environmental remediation projects.

"For the past 20 years, we have tackled...