NY's top environmental official fired

Gov. David A. Paterson fired the state's top environmental official last night days after his agency sent a memo saying mandated staff cuts would cripple the state's ability to enforce environmental laws.

Pete Grannis said last night he was asked to resign as Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner Wednesday by Paterson aide Lawrence Schwartz and refused. Grannis said the call firing him came shortly before he was to speak at a ceremony in Saratoga Springs honoring his environmental achievements.

A Paterson spokeswoman confirmed Grannis "has been terminated effective immediately" and said the office had no further comment.

The governor's budget office had ordered the DEC to eliminate 209 positions by the end of the year. Earlier this week an internal DEC memo was leaked to the press that said "further staff reductions may result in potential serious risks to human health and safety and environmental quality."

The memo said the agency had been disproportionately hurt by cutbacks in the wake of the state's fiscal crisis. DEC staff accounts for 2.5 percent of the state workforce, it said, and the 209 positions the agency had been ordered to cut comprised "more than 10 percent of the 2,000 positions that the governor plans to eliminate."

Grannis said his office did not leak the memo but that the attention made the governor's office "very uncomfortable. I think we were fairly forceful in the memo . . . obviously it resonated with the public."

Environmental advocates, who have long said the DEC is seriously understaffed, were outraged by news of Grannis' dismissal.

"Gov. Paterson has been dismantling the agency and tonight he cut off its head," said Robert Moore of the Albany-based group Environmental Advocates of New York.

Grannis was appointed by Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2007 and previously served for more than 30 years in the state Assembly representing the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island.