FW: MIAMI BLUE BUTTERFLY RESTORATION PROJECT

[Michael Gochfeld]

I don't doubt that power corrupts, but I wonder what State(s) Stan is writing
about.

Having just finished a three year project working with NJ bureaucrats on mercury,
I don't get the feeling that bureaucrats in our DEP have much in the way of
"power", and they certainjly don't have unlimited resources.  And, they have to
use those resources in court when faced with lawsuits over their regs, even when
the law suits are obviously frivilous.  So the door swings both ways around
bureaucrats as well.

When it comes to butterflies NJ has put most of its bureaucratic effort into
landscape scale preservation, the fruits of which will not ripen for a while.
And that project is severely under-funded and under-staffed.

Even when NJ had a budget surplus 8 years ago, the governor opted to return a few
dollars to the tax payers rather than fund the agency's conservation efforts.
This proved to be a disaster, leaving NJ with the largest budget deficit of any
state in the nation.  Most of us learned by third grade how to add and
subtract---but apparently not our former governor.  So the statement about
"unlimited resources" is certainly not generalizable.

Mike Gochfeld

Stan Gorodenski wrote:

This is a hope or idealism.  In the real world, civil servants in positions of
authority become bureaucrats.  They have virtually

> unlimited resources of the 'state' and will use these resources to their
> advantage to impose their will upon the common citizen, even when they
> are in the wrong or in a questionable position.  A common citizen has to
> pay for an attorney, which is usually a limiting factor, but this is,
> usually, no limitation to the bureaucrat - just charge it off to the tax
> payer.  I know from experience.  What's that expression about power
> corrupting?
> Stan
>
>
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