An industry-friendly proposal to limit public information about toxic chemicals is in critical condition at the Environmental Protection Agency after being shot to pieces during the past week by citizen groups, state officials and government watchdogs.
First OMB Watch, a non-partisan group that monitors federal policies, revealed that a former industry lobbyist drafted much of the EPA’s plan for cutting reporting requirements in the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) program.
The TRI program, started in 1988 after a chemical plant accident killed more than 2,000 people in Bhopal, India, requires companies that use more than 500 pounds of hazardous substances in a year to report annually on their releases to the environment.
The EPA proposed last year to raise the reporting threshold to 5,000 pounds of chemicals used per year and to allow some companies to report their releases every two years.
OMB Watch, after obtaining e-mails on EPA’s proposal, discovered that both those ideas came directly from an attorney for the U.S. Small Business Administration, Kevin Bromberg, who previously lobbied for a chemical industry group seeking similar changes in the TRI program.
OMB Watch spokesman George Sorvalis says the revelations show the industry had undue influence over EPA’s proposal. “It is certainly tainted,” he said. “It has the hand of industry on it.”
Then on Friday, the deadline for public comments on EPA’s plan, attorneys general from 12 states slammed the proposal for limiting critical information about health threats to residents near industrial plants.
“The public has a fundamental right to know what hazardous materials their children and families are being exposed to,” Wisconsin Attorney General Peggy Lautenschlager told the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, newspapers across the country have reported on how EPA’s proposed changes would substantially reduce the information available to the public about possible toxic hazards. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for instance, ran a story Sunday saying that 68 of 418 companies that now file chemical-release reports would no longer be required to file reports under the EPA plan.
