State Officials Blast EPA Changes

(AP)  Attorneys general in 12 states said Friday the Bush administration's plan to change the annual Toxic Release Inventory would help polluters and hurt the public's right to know about health risks from the legal release of toxic waste in their neighborhoods.

The state officials contend that raising some baseline reporting thresholds and changing the annual release to every two years would have the greatest harm in low-income neighborhoods were plants are often located.

"This EPA move appears to be yet another poorly considered notion to appease a few polluting constituents at the expense of a valuable program," said New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the lead state official in the effort.

Attorneys general in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont and Wisconsin joined Spitzer.

"The public has a fundamental right to know what hazardous materials their children and families are being exposed to in their communities," said Wisconsin Attorney General Peggy Lautenschlager. "No one has the right to hide their pollution and the federal government has no business helping to cover up this vital information."

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said reducing the flow of public information will increase the flow of deadly toxic chemicals such as lead and mercury.

"This steep public health compromise will have only bad consequences, for industry as well as the public, by undercutting the best business practices and encouraging the worst," he said.

The Bush administration in September announced it wanted to reduce the regulatory burden on companies by allowing some to use a short form when they report their pollution to the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory.

Those changes would exempt companies from disclosing their toxic pollution if they claim to release fewer than 5,000 pounds of a specific chemical, the current limit is 500 pounds, or if they store it onsite but claim to release "zero" amounts of the worst pollutants. Those include mercury, DDT, PCBs and other chemicals that persist in the environment and work up the food chain. However, companies must report any storage of dioxin or dioxin-like compounds, even if none are released.

EPA officials say communities will still know about the types of toxic releases, but not some of the details about how each chemical was managed or released. The inventory program began under a 1986 community right-to-know law. If Congress agrees, the first year the changes could be possible would be 2008.

An EPA spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the opposition by the state attorneys general.

"New Hampshire would lose critical toxic release information from most companies currently reporting, hindering state and local efforts to protect the public from toxic releases," said Attorney General Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, the lone Republican in the effort.

Low-income neighborhoods would be hurt most, said New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey.

"Citizens will be stripped of one of the effective tools they have ever had," Harvey said.

A three-part series by The Associated Press in December that provided air pollution data for neighborhoods nationwide underscored the need for full and frequent disclosure of the data, said Judith Enck, an environmental specialist in the New York Attorney General's Office.

"The toxic release inventory is the essential first tool you look at to see patterns as the AP did very effectively," Enck said. Without the Toxic Release Inventory, "you don't get very far," she said.