From increased beach closures due to fecal contamination from storm water runoff to neglected maintenance at state parks, Michigan’s charms are fading as the state shifts spending from conservation to advertising.

And some cuts could have catastrophic public health consequences:

* The DNR’s forest fire-fighting crew was 20 percent smaller than minimum staffing levels when a lighting strike in 2007 triggered a wildlife fire in the Upper Peninsula. Fueled by high winds, dry conditions and an understaffed crew of first responders, the Sleeper Lake fire near Newberry burned 18,000 acres of state forest and cost the DNR $7.5 million. The state’s current forest firefighting crew of 72 is half of the optimum staffing level.

* The state knows the location of nearly 9,200 leaking underground storage tanks, but has nowhere near the sums to clean them up. Left unchecked, those sites could poison groundwater and drinking water wells with a variety of harmful toxins.

The Dept. of Environmental Quality has been cut more severely than almost any other state department.

DEQ Director Dan Wyant told Bridge Magazine that his dept. plans to review the leaking underground storage tank program but he indicated the agency would focus on preserving natural resources through developing “partnerships” with the industries that it regulates.

Here’s a taste, from The Hill’s blog:

“Come on and click, flip it, turn the handle to the right, turn off the water, twist the handle real tight,” the nearly five-minute audio lesson begins.

“Slip on your sneakers, lace em up tight, leave the car parked you know that’s alright.”

Indeed, as the retro reminder tells us, “Public transportation is the way to go, it’s one of the ways to keep emissions low, you can ride your bike, instead of the car, if we save on fuel then we’ll all go far.”

Industry analysts for Kelley Blue Book, an auto valuation company, are pessimistic. Spokeswoman Robyn Eckard told TradingMarkets, “People don’t have money and it’s harder to get credit, and they have other financial priorities right now. … What we’re seeing is that lower gas prices are literally having zero effect right now.” Kelley Blue Book has found that 31 percent of prospective car buyers are delaying their purchases for at least a year.

Other industry folks, however, including the auto information website Edmunds.com, expect SUV and big- car sales to start going up again.

Still, new-car sales for October are expected to be the lowest since January 2002. In addition, according to the Dept. of Transportation, Americans drove 15 billion fewer miles in August 2008, compared with August 2007. That’s a 5.6 percent drop — and the biggest single-month drop since 1942.

While this is bad news for car companies and dealers, it’s certainly boosts the conservation effort that so many environmentalists — and some economists — are pushing for.

Overall, says the group’s president Gene Karpinski in a press release, “in 2008, Congress went in the wrong direction” — that is, away from reducing our country’s dependence on oil.

This year’s scorecard looks at 11 Senate votes and 13 House votes related to energy and environmental policies. Sixty-seven members of the House received a perfect rating, while 27 senators received a comparable score.  Some 70 members of the House and two senators received a zero rating.

The press release mentions “a vocal minority” in Congress, “led by Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and John Boehner (R-Oh), [who] used every trick in the book to help their allies in Big Oil and Big Coal.” The League of Conservation Voters says this vocal minority has led to billions of dollars in tax subsidies for oil companies.

Meanwhile, the league praised other Republicans, including Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), for introducing and supporting legislation to fight climate change and improve the environment and public health.

View the complete scorecard.