FROM PLANNING TO ACTION
Without a national network of local staff members, the Environmental Protection Service, like everyone else, turned to the municipalities. To its credit, some financial assistance was part of the EPS package. In 1976 the EPS announced its intention to start fifteen environmental protection units in cities with populations greater than eighty thousand people.[133] After an initial year of full subsidy, half of the local environmental officials' salaries were paid by the municipal government and half by the Ministry of the Interior.[134] Persuading towns to join the system was not always easy.[135] Amram Pruginin, an ebullient environmental geographer, was brought on board to oversee the initiative. As the Ministry of the Interior controls the municipal budgets in Israel, larger cities proved receptive.
The local environmental coordinators were supposed to be the EPS's “soldiers in the field.” They would answer the complaints, measure the noise, run the educational programs in the schools, and, of course, repre-sent the environmental interest before local planning committees. In the hands of the right person, a local unit's activities translated into impres-sive environmental progress.
For others, environmental regulation proved a bit too ambitious. Many units could not field staff with the required technical qualifications. In ad-dition, municipal employees knew who their boss was and avoided taking on the mayor about contentious issues surrounding pollution. Over time, the units became an entrenched part of the city hall bureaucracy. Exigency soon became ideology. Even after the Ministry of the Environment was created and its independent regional offices were available to replace the local units, the central government continued to subsidize them.
The rationale was simple. Most environmental nuisances were local in nature. Throughout his long career as a public servant, Marinov would advocate the view that a central government had no business overseeing emissions from a neighborhood bakery or noise from a particularly rau-cous discotheque. Just as city government provides education, welfare, or
While many minor nuisances received attention, the meager profes-sional qualifications of available local staff hindered many of the units' ability to tackle the most troublesome issues. Often, a pollution source was located beyond the geographic boundaries of an affected municipality, or the technical issues involved exceeded local enforcement capabilities. It was clear that the units were not a panacea. In 1978 Marinov called enforcement “the weak link in the wide chain of environmental man-agement.”[137] The local soldiers were no substitute for a centralized, independent, regulatory presence.
Two developments during the 1980s allowed the EPS to depart from its institutional personality of adviser and assume the role of “regulator.” The first was the establishment of a marine pollution prevention unit. The sec-ond was a series of emissions controls imposed on major air polluters in the Haifa region. Although neither effort solved all of the related prob-lems, they confirmed Marinov's analysis and showed what could happen when the enforcement link was tightened.