News Coverage
EPA Chief Questioned On Monsanto's Alabama PCB Deal
Published June 17, 2003
WASHINGTON, June 18 - Two environmental groups asked outgoing Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman on Wednesday if she improperly intervened to blunt terms of a federal settlement reached in 2002 with Monsanto Co. on massive PCB contamination in Alabama.
The Environmental Working Group questioned the timing of a staff briefing Whitman attended on the Anniston, Alabama, site on March 6, 2002, a week before EPA reached an agreement with Monsanto. The environmental group obtained the EPA documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Whitman is set to leave the EPA on June 27. The White House has not yet named a replacement.
The partial settlement, which could be approved by an Alabama federal judge in the near future, would resolve some liability for pollution at a former Monsanto plant. An Alabama jury in February 2002 found Monsanto liable for cleanup.
The green groups questioned the timing of what they call a "highly unusual" consent decree, and said it headed off a likely court cleanup order and replaced it with an EPA study.
"You see Monsanto getting off the hook significantly in an unprecedented intervention by federal hands," said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, which sent a letter to Whitman along with an Anniston citizens' group.
An EPA spokesman in Washington deferred comment to EPA's Southeast regional office.
Stan Meiburg, EPA's Southeast deputy regional administrator who attended the March 2002 briefing, said "it was absolutely a information briefing and regional control of the decision making on terms of the consent decree was pretty clear." Meiburg declined to comment on details of the meeting.
The Anniston plant produced PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, between 1935 and 1971 before the chemical was banned in 1979. PCBs were used as heat-resistant fluids in electrical transformers and compressors, and are a suspected carcinogen linked to cerebral palsy and neurological disorders.
Monsanto declined comment, referring questions to Solutia Inc. (nyse: SOI - news - people), a chemical unit divested by Monsanto in 1997.
Solutia is handling the clean-up, but Monsanto could still be liable for some of the costs, which have been pegged upward of $500 million. The EPA will not publish an estimate of clean-up costs before it completes its study, which could take "a couple of years," Meiburg said.
A Solutia spokesman dismissed suggestions that Monsanto was given a sweetheart deal, and said the draft settlements were subject to public comment before they were signed.
Whitman's briefing came after an Alabama jury in February 2002 found Monsanto liable for the pollution on six counts, including negligence and "outrage" -- a charge the state reserves for acts "atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."