EPA Announces New Region 2 Deputy Administrator & New Independent Scientific Review
We shift gears today, from inchoate catastrophic climate chaos to more mundane matters of management of the bureaucracy.
We thought we’d write about two recent noteworthy announcements by US EPA that caught our eye.
Both have implications for and provide strong contrasts to NJ’s efforts in enforcing environmental laws and in protecting public health and the environment.
- New Deputy Regional Administrator
The first is the announcement of a new Deputy Regional Administrator in the EPA Region 2 NY City Office. EPA region 2 has oversight of NY, NJ and Puerto Rico.
Enforcement specialist to become Region 2’s new No. 2
Robin Bravender, E&E reporter
Published: Tuesday, October 14, 2014
A new second in command with enforcement chops will soon be arriving at U.S. EPA’s regional office in New York.
Catherine McCabe, a veteran of EPA and the Justice Department, will be leaving her post at EPA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., next month to become deputy chief in Region 2, Regional Administrator Judith Enck told staffers last month in an email obtained by Greenwire. McCabe will take over for George Pavlou, who plans to retire after more than 40 years at EPA.
McCabe is currently a judge on EPA’s environmental appeals board; she was previously principal deputy assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance during both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. She also spent 22 years in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Justice Department and was an assistant attorney general in New York before she joined the federal workforce.
Since November 2011, McCabe has been one of four judges on the EPA appeals board — an impartial panel that’s charged with resolving some of the disputes that arise from the application of environmental laws. The board primarily decides cases that involve challenges to environmental permits and challenges to EPA’s assessments of fines for those who violate environmental laws.
We note that Dupont successfully filed a challenge of EPA Region 2’s RCRA permit to the Environmental Appeals Board during Ms. McCabe’s tenure – so we assume that she will recuse herself from Dupont matters – at least in Pompton lakes – and her enforcement experience will be useless where it is most needed. EPA really screwed that RCRA permit up.
NJ PEER issued this statement:
We are pleased that the new EPA Region 2 Deputy Administrator has an enforcement background. Catherine McCabe is a veteran of EPA and the Justice Department.
We hope that Deputy McCabe can beef up Region 2’s oversight of the Christie DEP, particularly with respect to regulatory rollbacks and enforcement of federally delegated and funded clean air, clean water, and hazardous waste management programs.
McCabe’s leadership also may have implications for the Dupont Pompton Lakes RCRA site, that begs for EPA enforcement, as well as for NJ violators who have evaded lax NJDEP enforcement efforts.
Perhaps McCabe can stiffen the spine of her boss, Regional Administrator Enck.
At the outset, we had high hopes for Enck, and looked to her for a strong federal oversight backstop against the Christie Administration’s regulatory and enforcement rollbacks. But she has been a disappointment.
Instead of playing that aggressive watchdog role – from enforcement of the Clean Water Act in Barnegat Bay; to blocking rollbacks in State water quality management and surface water quality standards; to water quality assessment and TMDL requirements; to RCRA in Pompton Lakes; to oversight on a privatized state toxic site cleanup program; to abandonment of drinking water standards; to failure to properly monitor air quality; to blocking extension of the BL England coal plant closure; to putting the brakes on the Christie DEP’s “regulatory relief” and “customer service” policies that have turned DEP enforcement staff into industry consultants – EPA has largely stood down, with a few exceptions where EPA symbolically saber rattled but never really cracked down.
Worse, EPA has folded on some big federal decisions – the Superfund cleanup decision in Ringwood alone is enough to tarnish Enck’s legacy. We can sense a similar cave coming in the Passaic River Superfund cleanup.
To her credit, Enck resisted strong political pressure and did the right thing in listing the Troy Chemical Superfund site in Newark.
We wish McCabe best of luck – she will need it.
- Independent Scientific Review?
The second EPA announcement is about expanding independent scientific expertise in EPA’s assessment of chemical risks:
Today, EPA announced that the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) Program’s Bimonthly Public Science meetings will be supplemented with independent scientific experts identified by the National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC). These independent experts will contribute to the scientific discussion of issues amongst EPA and public commenters. The input provided by individuals identified by the NRC will ensure that a range of scientific perspectives are represented in IRIS public science meetings. […]
These experts, who will be reviewed by the NRC for conflicts of interest and bias, will provide valuable, independent scientific input to these meetings. The involvement of NRC experts will significantly contribute to broadening the range of perspectives represented at our public meetings.
Science and scientific integrity are the backbone of every decision, policy, and action at EPA. The supplementation of our ongoing public meetings with independent experts identified by the NRC will help assure that overall a full and impartial representation of the science will serve as the foundation for the IRIS Program’s assessments to protect human health.
These reforms seem to be well intentioned and originate from a critical NRC Report.
But we’ve heard all this kind of rhetoric before and remain skeptical.
We’ve seen – repeatedly – how industry always seems to hijack reform efforts and end up using them to promote their own economic interests.
Let’s hope that the EPA IRIS review process works out better than NJ DEP’s Science Advisory Board (SAB).
Here in NJ, our DEP Science Advisory Board includes such eminent “independent” “non-biased” scientists as representatives of the Dupont Corporation .
The NJ DEP SAB was created by former Obama EPA Administrator and then NJ DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson.
We recently reported that Dupont’s representative on the SAB, John Gannon, according to a Rutgers scientist, provided “significant input” into the SAB’s most recent report on unregulated emergent contaminants.
Amazingly, that SAB Report recommended the use of a Dupont developed chemical hazard assessment methodology – no kidding, Gannon touted a Dupont method to screen the safety of hundreds of chemicals in your drinking water! see:
Yet amazingly, that breach of scientific ethics and sell out of the public interest got no press coverage whatsoever.