WASHINGTON -- Environmental Protection Agency investigators have found fundamental weaknesses in a major national air-pollution control program that have allowed many "significant violators" of federal and state regulations to escape inspections and sanctions for years.
Recent reorganizations within the EPA helped generate a serious lack of federal oversight over the program that monitors factories, utilities and stationary sources of pollution, according to the EPA's Office of Inspector General. The program, started in 1970 under the Clean Air Act, is one of the nation's most complex and far-reaching environmental regulatory efforts.
According to EPA, billions of pounds of air pollutants, moving with the nation's weather patterns, cause as many as 3,000 cancer deaths in the U.S. every year, along with numerous other ailments. Lack of oversight on the sources of this pollution exacerbates the problem.
Lack of 'Baseline Data'
"It is my belief that one of the biggest problems in the EPA is accountability," said Nikki L. Tinsley, the agency's inspector general. She said her office's seven audits found that the EPA doesn't have adequate records of the nation's major air polluters. "Without that baseline data, you don't have a foundation for the program," she said.
The audits, conducted in different areas of the country, show that for several years, state environmental agencies substantially underreported local Clean Air Act violations. Under the law, states are paid more than $160 million a year to conduct inspections and enforce federal air standards for Washington. In 3,300 inspection files, states reported 18 "significant" violations. Ms. Tinsley's auditors, reviewing the same cases, found 103.
One result has been that negotiations between the EPA and state agencies have often turned bitter as the parties worked to update program regulations to narrow the definition of who may be deemed a "significant violator."
Asked about the audits, Sylvia Lowrance, who heads the EPA's enforcement and compliance-assurance office, said: "We found a whole series of problems. Frequently, the states weren't fulfilling their inspection commitments." Those that did inspect, according to the EPA audits, frequently didn't log violations into the EPA's national database, used to track air-quality problems.
"I've become kind of a loud-mouth critic because I was so hacked about what was happening to me and my state," said Keith Michaels, head of Arkansas's Department of Pollution Control and Ecology. He said Arkansas was following an enforcement plan negotiated by a predecessor with EPA regional officials, a plan that Mr. Michaels discovered to be "very unworkable."
Agency Reorganization in '94
EPA auditors put some of the blame on a 1994 agency reorganization that separated the enforcement branch from one that provides grant money to the states. That has left federal enforcement officials with little leverage to push states into compliance.
William Becker, who heads the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators association, based in Washington, blamed the EPA's 10 regional offices, which, he said, were making an "inconsistent application of the program" in their dealings with states. Some states are "livid" about the inspector general's findings, he added.
One player in the "livid" category is Mr. Michaels. He says his office was assured by the EPA's regional office that monthly reports of pollution violations were unnecessary. Then the EPA's inspectors came in, berating Arkansas for not filing timely reports.
James M. Seif, secretary of Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection, said his state had worked out an informal exchange of information with its EPA region that allowed it to keep some violators off the EPA's list while the state helped bring them into compliance. "It was smart people working around a bureaucratic artifact," said Mr. Seif, who called the inspector general's report a "classic bum rap."
The audit on Pennsylvania notes that of 270 emission sources reviewed, 64 were significant violators that had gone unreported. Asked about a pollution-spewing adhesives plant that exceeded federal guidelines for 13 years, Mr. Seif, who until 1989 headed the EPA region that oversees Pennsylvania, admitted that "there might be a legitimate complaint about the pace of things."
Word about the Inspector General's tough audits apparently didn't spread very quickly among state and federal environmental officials. Pennsylvania's underreporting and misunderstandings with the EPA's regional office were first noticed in 1996. When the auditors got to Idaho this spring, they found the same problems there.
Issues in Idaho
"Idaho made it clear" to EPA's regional office, "that we wouldn't be able to adhere to rigors of national policies because of resource problems and because we didn't think it was needed to get the job done," explained David Pisarski, chief of compliance of Idaho's Division of Environmental Quality.
He said the EPA's regional office agreed to the arrangement, but then denied it after Idaho was accused by the EPA's inspector general of failing to report violators, not issuing substantial penalties and failing to report 23 out of 24 violations in a timely manner. In one case involving a "state-owned facility," the auditors found, Idaho had failed to crack down on a pollution-prone boiler first reported in 1986.
Mr. Pisarski said that fining the facility, a wood-fired heating plant at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, "really didn't make any sense. In this case, the penalty would have been passing money from one state coffer to another." He said Idaho offered to let the EPA's regional office take over the case, "but they said they understood, and they allowed us to proceed." He admitted the case "took longer to resolve than we would have liked."
Merrylin Zaw-Mon, director of air and radiation administration for Maryland's Department of the Environment, said her office had been working comfortably with its EPA regional office "for several years, and these issues were never raised. And all of a sudden you have the inspector general coming in and finding significant violations."
Benefits in Maryland
Under prodding from Ms. Zaw-Mon and other state officials, the EPA has agreed to redefine "significant violator." Forthcoming EPA guidelines will narrow enforcement efforts to focus attention on "high-priority violators," a new name for the most serious pollution cases.
While they are still a bit hot under the collar, Ms. Zaw-Mon and some other state officials acknowledged that some good has come out of the work of the EPA's probe. In Maryland, the inspector general's sleuths found the state's employees making slapdash inspections that produced reports with few details. Repeated inspections of a truck-engine plant missed an unregistered spray-painting facility for 18 years.
In retrospect, Ms. Zaw-Mon thinks her inspectors were spread too thinly. "I think it was a philosophical difference. We believed our presence at these facilities might prevent violations. So, we were out there, but perhaps we didn't do a bang-up job in terms of reporting what we saw."
She said Maryland officials are working hard to get the EPA's national-enforcement program fixed because otherwise states that cooperate could still be polluted by states that don't. "Air gets transported from state to state, so if you have a state with a weak program, the results get transported somewhere else."
According to the EPA, this is not a trivial matter. It estimates that 2.7 billion pounds of toxic air pollutants are emitted every year in the U.S. Exposure to some of these pollutants, according to agency studies, can cause cancer, lung illness in adults and retardation and brain damage, especially in children.
Comments on this posting?
Click here to post a public comment on the Trash Talk Bulletin Board.
Click here to send a private comment to the Junkman.
Copyright © 1998 Steven J. Milloy. All rights reserved on original material. Material copyrighted by others is used either with permission or under a claim of "fair use." Site developed and hosted by WestLake Solutions, Inc.
Material presented on this home page constitutes opinion of Steven J. Milloy.