News Coverage
Plan to clean up Anniston PCBs seen as diluted
Watchdog says EPA under Bush undercut state
Published June 18, 2003
WASHINGTON - A plan to rid Anniston of its PCB pollution was watered down after federal regulators with the Bush administration intervened, an environmental watchdog organization charged Wednesday.
Over 14 months, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency negotiated, outside of court, terms for cleaning up the contaminated town with the company responsible for dumping the substance over 40 years. But the final agreement, which is pending approval by a federal judge, is much weaker than what the EPA proposed a few days before President Bush took office, environmentalists argue.
"This decree, negotiated in secret, seems to us to have severely weakened the hand of the local community to finally get some justice," said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group.
The nonprofit organization also is asking EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman to explain why, less than three weeks after an Alabama jury found the chemical company negligent and liable for the dumping, the decree was changed to assert more federal control in the cleanup.
The result, Cook said, is that a more aggressive cleanup schedule pursued by the state was replaced with a federal plan that allows more time for study and analysis.
"It took a lot of things off the table that the people of Anniston want," Cook said.
Cook and David Baker Sr. of Anniston wrote Whitman on Wednesday, asking if the decree was discussed in a March 6, 2002, briefing she received in the case. They also asked whether officials with Solutia Inc., formerly known as Monsanto, were involved in the reworking of the decree announced one week later.
"Now we want to know, from you, how and why an EPA agreement so favorable to Monsanto came about precisely when a state court was poised to impose much more stringent, costly and entirely appropriate remedies on the company," they wrote.
Stan Meiburg, the deputy regional administrator in EPA's Atlanta office, said the decree was negotiated by regional EPA officials, a standard practice, and Whitman's informational briefing was routine in a case that was receiving extensive media coverage at the time.
"The implication that there was some particular action or decision made is really not accurate," he said.
'Worst first':
The decree was examined last year by a Senate committee, where EPA officials defended it as strong and enforceable. After a study to determine the extent of the contamination, the companies would clean residential yards on a "worst first" basis, pay $3.2 million over 12 years for children with special educational needs, and provide $150,000 for citizen groups to hire their own consultants to define the areas of contamination and the risks to the public.
"I do not think it is fair to characterize it as watered down," Meiburg said. The EPA felt the decree was the best way to provide the most "rapid, expeditious and cost-effective clean up possible," Meiburg said.
But the Environmental Working Group provided a document that shows the EPA in early January 2001, in the final days of the Clinton administration, proposed the company also pay for a major health investigation of the residents and health care for those residents with elevated levels of PCB in their blood.
Meiburg said it "is fairest to say that in the course of any negotiation, you obviously try and seek everything you can get ... and sometimes you can't."
PCBs polychlorinated biphenyls were produced at the Anniston plant until 1971 for use in electrical equipment. Now banned by the federal government, they are considered a probable carcinogen.
The pending consent decree, while it would not change the money damages being awarded plaintiffs in an ongoing state trial, would dictate the speed of the cleanup and give federal, not state, regulators oversight of the process.
"The EPA has traditionally preempted state authority for environmental enforcement actions only when states are failing to act, not to block state action with federal inaction," Cook wrote.
EPA has also said that two agency officials with past connections to Monsanto and related industries did not participate in the Anniston case.