Working in a Deeper Shade of Green

Also, by using new top 10 lists of violations, staffers can focus their time and budget on the biggest challenges and prevent environmental problems from occurring. For example, the surface mining program discovered the most common violation was that companies were not constructing ponds to catch sediments and prevent them from clogging streams. In response, the department developed an education program to train bulldozer operators to do things correctly. The result: The number of violations dropped significantly, from 205 in 1996 to 119 in 2000.

There are still growing pains, to be sure. Tim Jolly, a compliance specialist with DEP's water management program, says that some of the information he gathers is simply too complex to represent in a common systemfor instance, ongoing violations that aren't solved in one visit. Nevertheless, eFACTS has momentum. "We actually have [DEP programs] volunteering" to start using eFACTS, says Nancie Imler, bureau director of program integration and effectiveness.

A licensing agreement may yield further payoffs. More than a dozen states interested in the software contacted the department, and Pennsylvania decided to turn the task of explaining itand selling itover to Compaq, which helped develop it. For each state Compaq signs on, the DEP gets $250,000 in service credit.

Most important, perhaps, citizens are making use of the system. In October, the website had an average of 251 user sessions per day. Last July, the DEP unrolled an eNotice system, in which citizens can sign up to receive e-mails about permit applications in their neighborhood, and by November, 1,750 citizens had signed up for the service.

The value of eFACTS is "a terribly difficult thing to quantify," Nelson admits from her new office at the EPA in Washington, D.C. "It's a matter of the culture and the focus of the organizationis it going to be a problem-solving organization or a reactive, enforcement organization? If you want to be proactive, then you need information like this to make it happen."