9-13-09

 
9-13-09
Indybay
Steinberg's Water Bill Package Defeated...Dan Bacher...9-12-09
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/09/12/18621685.php
Senate President Pro tem Darrell Steinberg and other Legislators abandoned their attempt to rush the water bond and bill package, a thinly-veiled road map to the peripheral canal, through the Capitol in the final hours of the Legislative Session.
Faced with overwhelming and wide-ranging opposition by the people of California, Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and other Legislators abandoned their attempt to rush a controversial water bond and bill package through the Capitol in the final hours of the Legislative Session Friday.
Delta advocates said the passage of the bill would have resulted in the construction of a peripheral canal and an increase in water exports out of the imperiled Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, sealing the doom of the collapsing Central Valley salmon and Delta fish populations as well as Delta agriculture. They also contended the legislation would have greatly weakened California water rights and Public Trust law.
Although this was a great victory for the broad coalition of fishing, conservation, environmental justice, tribal, labor and farming groups and Delta counties and cities that opposed the legislation, the war to save and restore the Delta has just begun, according to bill opponents.
"We're not finished yet," said Assemblymember Lois Wolk (D-Davis). "We need to focus now on what we need to do to save the Delta. We have a lot of work to do to restore our fisheries and protect habitat and Delta agriculture."
"We won," said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta. "Thank Lois Wolk."
Senator Wolk on Wednesday withdrew her authorship of Senate Bill 458, legislation that would establish a Delta Conservancy, because of her concern that the bill's amended version would serve as a "tool to assist water exporters who are primarily responsible for the Delta's decline."
Wolk took this unusual action after being notified by Steinberg that her legislation would be amended in a Water Conference Committee with provisions Senator Wolk and the five Delta counties opposed. Wolk was replaced with Senators Steinberg and Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) as the authors of SB 458.
Robert Johnson of Californians Against the Canal emphasized that the problems of the Delta and northern California fisheries cannot be solved without addressing the retirement of selenium-filled lands in the San Joaquin Valley's west side that would free upwards of 1.5 million acre feet of water for fish and the environment.
"The resources saved by funding 21st Century water solutions, including the retirement of drainage impaired land and increased water conservation, would be far more effective and less costly than the current water scenario," said Johnson. "These solutions would also free up tremendous resources to deal with the humanitarian crisis caused by unrestrained agriculture growth in Kings, Kern, Fresno and Madera counties in recent decades."
"It took a massive effort by the fishing, conservation and environmental community to stand up to the multimillion dollar lobbying of the Southern California water districts but we did it," summed up Jerry Neuburger of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA). "Your letters, faxes, and phone calls made the difference. With your help, CSPA was the tip of the arrow aimed at this destructive bill's heart."
"The bad news is, like Arnold, they'll be back," he quipped. "A special session is in the works so please don't think this is over. But for now, smell the roses, drink the champagne and take a trip to Disneyland!"
Over the past week, Steinberg's attempt to ram the bill package through the Capitol ignited a grass roots uprising of Steinberg's constituents and Delta residents. Barbara Daly of Save the Delta and Kim Glazzard of Organic Sacramento organized three days of protests outside of Steinberg's office to put political pressure on Steinberg.
The broad-spread opposition was evidenced Friday night during the final hearing on SB 68 (AB 893). While several people, including representatives of NRDC, Environmental Defense, the Nature Conservancy, the Bay Institute and Metropolitan Water District spoke in favor of the water bill package, over 50 people spoke against it.
The wide ranging opponents of the legislation included the California Farm Bureau, Sierra Club, Planning and Conservation League, the SEIU State Council, the Teamsters Union and City of Sacramento. Even Phil Isenberg, the chairman of the Delta Vision Task Form, opposed the legislation in a letter hand delivered to Legislators. Many speakers complained that the legislation was rushed, failed to include proper input from Delta legislators and residents and would actually worsen, rather than help, the imperiled California Delta.
"The crisis on the Delta is universally acknowledged," said Barry Nelson, senior policy analyst for NRDC, in urging the Legislators to pass the bill. "The status quo, the way the Delta is managed now, is not sustainable.
"This legislation will do nothing to help the Delta," countered Jim Metropolous, Senior Advocate of the Sierra Club California. "What's the rush to pass this bill package when the legislation states that it will take two years to come up with a plan? What we need is for the DFG and State Water Board to do their job enforcing the law."
Senator Steinberg made a last minute appeal to garner support for the legislation. "I'm willing to concede and compromise on water storage, continuous appropriations and general obligation bonds because if we want to solve California's water problems, we have to compromise," he said. "My bill offers the best effort to compromise. We brought Environmental Defense, NRDC, the Audubon Society, Westlands Water District and the Metropolitan Water District together to negotiate this compromise."
However, by late Friday evening, massive opposition to the bill by both Republican and Democratic legislators became clear to Steinberg, Assemblymember Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and they shelved the legislation before it went to a floor vote.
New York Times
Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering...CHARLES DUHIGG. Karl Russell contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html?_r=1&sq=mining&st=cse&scp=3&pagewanted=print
Jennifer Hall-Massey knows not to drink the tap water in her home near Charleston, W.Va.
In fact, her entire family tries to avoid any contact with the water. Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused painful rashes. Many of his brother’s teeth were capped to replace enamel that was eaten away.
Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.
“How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?” said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state’s largest banks.
She and her husband, Charles, do not live in some remote corner of Appalachia. Charleston, the state capital, is less than 17 miles from her home.
“How is this still happening today?” she asked.
When Mrs. Hall-Massey and 264 neighbors sued nine nearby coal companies, accusing them of putting dangerous waste into local water supplies, their lawyer did not have to look far for evidence. As required by state law, some of the companies had disclosed in reports to regulators that they were pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals — the same pollutants that flowed from residents’ taps.
But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws.
This pattern is not limited to West Virginia. Almost four decades ago, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to force polluters to disclose the toxins they dump into waterways and to give regulators the power to fine or jail offenders. States have passed pollution statutes of their own. But in recent years, violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily across the nation, an extensive review of water pollution records by The New York Times found.
In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.
However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.
Because it is difficult to determine what causes diseases like cancer, it is impossible to know how many illnesses are the result of water pollution, or contaminants’ role in the health problems of specific individuals.
But concerns over these toxins are great enough that Congress and the E.P.A. regulate more than 100 pollutants through the Clean Water Act and strictly limit 91 chemicals or contaminants in tap water through the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Regulators themselves acknowledge lapses. The new E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said in an interview that despite many successes since the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, today the nation’s water does not meet public health goals, and enforcement of water pollution laws is unacceptably low. She added that strengthening water protections is among her top priorities. State regulators say they are doing their best with insufficient resources.
The Times obtained hundreds of thousands of water pollution records through Freedom of Information Act requests to every state and the E.P.A., and compiled a national database of water pollution violations that is more comprehensive than those maintained by states or the E.P.A. (For an interactive version, which can show violations in any community, visit www.nytimes.com/toxicwaters.)
In addition, The Times interviewed more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists.
That research shows that an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways.
Those exposures include carcinogens in the tap water of major American cities and unsafe chemicals in drinking-water wells. Wells, which are not typically regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, are more likely to contain contaminants than municipal water systems.
Because most of today’s water pollution has no scent or taste, many people who consume dangerous chemicals do not realize it, even after they become sick, researchers say.
But an estimated 19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from drinking water contaminated with parasites, bacteria or viruses, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. That figure does not include illnesses caused by other chemicals and toxins.
In the nation’s largest dairy states, like Wisconsin and California, farmers have sprayed liquefied animal feces onto fields, where it has seeped into wells, causing severe infections. Tap water in parts of the Farm Belt, including cities in Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and Indiana, has contained pesticides at concentrations that some scientists have linked to birth defects and fertility problems.
In parts of New York, Rhode Island, Ohio, California and other states where sewer systems cannot accommodate heavy rains, untreated human waste has flowed into rivers and washed onto beaches. Drinking water in parts of New Jersey, New York, Arizona and Massachusetts shows some of the highest concentrations of tetrachloroethylene, a dry cleaning solvent that has been linked to kidney damage and cancer. (Specific types of water pollution across the United States will be examined in future Times articles.)
The Times’s research also shows that last year, 40 percent of the nation’s community water systems violated the Safe Drinking Water Act at least once, according to an analysis of E.P.A. data. Those violations ranged from failing to maintain proper paperwork to allowing carcinogens into tap water. More than 23 million people received drinking water from municipal systems that violated a health-based standard.
In some cases, people got sick right away. In other situations, pollutants like chemicals, inorganic toxins and heavy metals can accumulate in the body for years or decades before they cause problems. Some of the most frequently detected contaminants have been linked to cancer, birth defects and neurological disorders.
Records analyzed by The Times indicate that the Clean Water Act has been violated more than 506,000 times since 2004, by more than 23,000 companies and other facilities, according to reports submitted by polluters themselves. Companies sometimes test what they are dumping only once a quarter, so the actual number of days when they broke the law is often far higher. And some companies illegally avoid reporting their emissions, say officials, so infractions go unrecorded.
Environmental groups say the number of Clean Water Act violations has increased significantly in the last decade. Comprehensive data go back only five years but show that the number of facilities violating the Clean Water Act grew more than 16 percent from 2004 to 2007, the most recent year with complete data.
Polluters include small companies, like gas stations, dry cleaners, shopping malls and the Friendly Acres Mobile Home Park in Laporte, Ind., which acknowledged to regulators that it had dumped human waste into a nearby river for three years.
They also include large operations, like chemical factories, power plants, sewage treatment centers and one of the biggest zinc smelters, the Horsehead Corporation of Pennsylvania, which has dumped illegal concentrations of copper, lead, zinc, chlorine and selenium into the Ohio River. Those chemicals can contribute to mental retardation and cancer.
Some violations are relatively minor. But about 60 percent of the polluters were deemed in “significant noncompliance” — meaning their violations were the most serious kind, like dumping cancer-causing chemicals or failing to measure or report when they pollute.
Finally, the Times’s research shows that fewer than 3 percent of Clean Water Act violations resulted in fines or other significant punishments by state officials. And the E.P.A. has often declined to prosecute polluters or force states to strengthen their enforcement by threatening to withhold federal money or take away powers the agency has delegated to state officials.
Neither Friendly Acres Mobile Home Park nor Horsehead, for instance, was fined for Clean Water Act violations in the last eight years. A representative of Friendly Acres declined to comment. Indiana officials say they are investigating the mobile home park. A representative of Horsehead said the company had taken steps to control pollution and was negotiating with regulators to clean up its emissions.
Numerous state and federal lawmakers said they were unaware that pollution was so widespread.
“I don’t think anyone realized how bad things have become,” said Representative James L. Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat, when told of The Times’s findings. Mr. Oberstar is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which has jurisdiction over many water-quality issues.
“The E.P.A. and states have completely dropped the ball,” he said. “Without oversight and enforcement, companies will use our lakes and rivers as dumping grounds — and that’s exactly what is apparently going on.”
The E.P.A. administrator, Ms. Jackson, whose appointment was confirmed in January, said in an interview that she intended to strengthen enforcement of the Clean Water Act and pressure states to apply the law.
“I’ve been saying since Day One I want to work on these water issues pretty broadly across the country,” she said. On Friday, the E.P.A. said that it was reviewing dozens of coal-mining permits in West Virginia and three other states to make sure they would not violate the Clean Water Act.
After E.P.A. officials received detailed questions from The New York Times in June, Ms. Jackson sent a memo to her enforcement deputy noting that the E.P.A. is “falling short of this administration’s expectations for the effectiveness of our clean water enforcement programs. Data available to E.P.A. shows that, in many parts of the country, the level of significant noncompliance with permitting requirements is unacceptably high and the level of enforcement activity is unacceptably low.”
State officials, for their part, attribute rising pollution rates to increased workloads and dwindling resources. In 46 states, local regulators have primary responsibility for crucial aspects of the Clean Water Act. Though the number of regulated facilities has more than doubled in the last 10 years, many state enforcement budgets have remained essentially flat when adjusted for inflation. In New York, for example, the number of regulated polluters has almost doubled to 19,000 in the last decade, but the number of inspections each year has remained about the same.
But stretched resources are only part of the reason polluters escape punishment. The Times’s investigation shows that in West Virginia and other states, powerful industries have often successfully lobbied to undermine effective regulation.
State officials also argue that water pollution statistics include minor infractions, like failing to file reports, which do not pose risks to human health, and that records collected by The Times failed to examine informal enforcement methods, like sending warning letters.
“We work enormously hard inspecting our coal mines, analyzing water samples, notifying companies of violations when we detect them,” said Randy Huffman, head of West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection. “When I look at how far we’ve come in protecting the state’s waters since we took responsibility for the Clean Water Act, I think we have a lot to be proud of.”
But unchecked pollution remains a problem in many states. West Virginia offers a revealing example of why so many companies escape punishment.
One Community’s Plight
The mountains surrounding the home of Mrs. Hall-Massey’s family and West Virginia’s nearby capital have long been mined for coal. And for years, the area enjoyed clean well water.
But starting about a decade ago, awful smells began coming from local taps. The water was sometimes gray, cloudy and oily. Bathtubs and washers developed rust-colored rings that scrubbing could not remove. When Mrs. Hall-Massey’s husband installed industrial water filters, they quickly turned black. Tests showed that their water contained toxic amounts of lead, manganese, barium and other metals that can contribute to organ failure or developmental problems.
Around that time, nearby coal companies had begun pumping industrial waste into the ground.
Mining companies often wash their coal to remove impurities. The leftover liquid — a black fluid containing dissolved minerals and chemicals, known as sludge or slurry — is often disposed of in vast lagoons or through injection into abandoned mines. The liquid in those lagoons and shafts can flow through cracks in the earth into water supplies. Companies must regularly send samples of the injected liquid to labs, which provide reports that are forwarded to state regulators.
In the eight miles surrounding Mrs. Hall-Massey’s home, coal companies have injected more than 1.9 billion gallons of coal slurry and sludge into the ground since 2004, according to a review of thousands of state records. Millions more gallons have been dumped into lagoons.
These underground injections have contained chemicals at concentrations that pose serious health risks, and thousands of injections have violated state regulations and the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to reports sent to the state by companies themselves.
For instance, three coal companies — Loadout, Remington Coal and Pine Ridge, a subsidiary of Peabody Energy, one of the largest coal companies in the world — reported to state officials that 93 percent of the waste they injected near this community had illegal concentrations of chemicals including arsenic, lead, chromium, beryllium or nickel.
Sometimes those concentrations exceeded legal limits by as much as 1,000 percent. Those chemicals have been shown to contribute to cancer, organ failures and other diseases.
But those companies were never fined or punished for those illegal injections, according to state records. They were never even warned that their activities had been noticed.
Remington Coal declined to comment. A representative of Loadout’s parent said the company had assigned its permit to another company, which ceased injecting in 2006. Peabody Energy, which spun off Pine Ridge in 2007, said that some data sent to regulators was inaccurate and that the company’s actions reflected best industry practices.
West Virginia officials, when asked about these violations, said regulators had accidentally overlooked many pollution records the companies submitted until after the statute of limitations had passed, so no action was taken. They also said their studies indicated that those injections could not have affected drinking water in the area and that other injections also had no detectable effect.
State officials noted that they had cited more than 4,200 water pollution violations at mine sites around the state since 2000, as well as conducted thousands of investigations. The state has initiated research about how mining affects water quality. After receiving questions from The Times, officials announced a statewide moratorium on issuing injection permits and told some companies that regulators were investigating their injections.
“Many of the issues you are examining are several years old, and many have been addressed,” West Virginia officials wrote in a statement. The state’s pollution program “has had its share of issues,” regulators wrote. However, “it is important to note that if the close scrutiny given to our state had been given to others, it is likely that similar issues would have been found.”
More than 350 other companies and facilities in West Virginia have also violated the Clean Water Act in recent years, records show. Those infractions include releasing illegal concentrations of iron, manganese, aluminum and other chemicals into lakes and rivers.
As the water in Mrs. Hall-Massey’s community continued to worsen, residents began complaining of increased health problems. Gall bladder diseases, fertility problems, miscarriages and kidney and thyroid issues became common, according to interviews.
When Mrs. Hall-Massey’s family left on vacation, her sons’ rashes cleared up. When they returned, the rashes reappeared. Her dentist told her that chemicals appeared to be damaging her teeth and her son’s, she said. As the quality of her water worsened, Mrs. Hall-Massey’s once-healthy teeth needed many crowns. Her son brushed his teeth often, used a fluoride rinse twice a day and was not allowed to eat sweets. Even so, he continued getting cavities until the family stopped using tap water. By the time his younger brother’s teeth started coming in, the family was using bottled water to brush. He has not had dental problems.
Medical professionals in the area say residents show unusually high rates of health problems. A survey of more than 100 residents conducted by a nurse hired by Mrs. Hall-Massey’s lawyer indicated that as many as 30 percent of people in this area have had their gallbladders removed, and as many as half the residents have significant tooth enamel damage, chronic stomach problems and other illnesses. That research was confirmed through interviews with residents.
It is difficult to determine which companies, if any, are responsible for the contamination that made its way into tap water or to conclude which specific chemicals, if any, are responsible for particular health problems. Many coal companies say they did not pollute the area’s drinking water and chose injection sites that flowed away from nearby homes.
An independent study by a university researcher challenges some of those claims.
“I don’t know what else could be polluting these wells,” said Ben Stout, a biology professor at Wheeling Jesuit University who tested the water in this community and elsewhere in West Virginia. “The chemicals coming out of people’s taps are identical to the chemicals the coal companies are pumping into the ground.”
One night, Mrs. Hall-Massey’s 6-year-old son, Clay, asked to play in the tub. When he got out, his bright red rashes hurt so much he could not fall asleep. Soon, Mrs. Hall-Massey began complaining to state officials. They told her they did not know why her water was bad, she recalls, but doubted coal companies had done anything wrong. The family put their house on the market, but because of the water, buyers were not interested.
In December, Mrs. Hall-Massey and neighbors sued in county court, seeking compensation. That suit is pending. To resolve a related lawsuit filed about the same time, the community today gets regular deliveries of clean drinking water, stored in coolers or large blue barrels outside most homes. Construction began in August on a pipeline bringing fresh water to the community.
But for now most residents still use polluted water to bathe, shower and wash dishes.
“A parent’s only real job is to protect our children,” Mrs. Hall-Massey said. “But where was the government when we needed them to protect us from this stuff?”
Regulators ‘Overwhelmed’
Matthew Crum, a 43-year-old lawyer, wanted to protect people like Mrs. Hall-Massey. That is why he joined West Virginia’s environmental protection agency in 2001, when it became clear that the state’s and nation’s streams and rivers were becoming more polluted.
But he said he quickly learned that good intentions could not compete with intimidating politicians and a fearful bureaucracy.
Mr. Crum grew up during a golden age of environmental activism. He was in elementary school when Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972 in response to environmental disasters, including a fire on the polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. The act’s goal was to eliminate most water pollution by 1985 and prohibit the “discharge of toxic pollutants in toxic amounts.”
“There were a bunch of us that were raised with the example of the Clean Water Act as inspiration,” he said. “I wanted to be part of that fight.”
In the two decades after the act’s passage, the nation’s waters grew much healthier. The Cuyahoga River, West Virginia’s Kanawha River and hundreds of other beaches, streams and ponds were revitalized.
But in the late 1990s, some states’ enforcement of pollution laws began tapering off, according to regulators and environmentalists. Soon the E.P.A. started reporting that the nation’s rivers, lakes and estuaries were becoming dirtier again. Mr. Crum, after a stint in Washington with the Justice Department and the birth of his first child, joined West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection, where new leadership was committed to revitalizing the Clean Water Act.
He said his idealism was tested within two weeks, when he was called to a huge coal spill into a stream.
“I met our inspector at the spill site, and we had this really awkward conversation,” Mr. Crum recalled. “I said we should shut down the mine until everything was cleaned up. The inspector agreed, but he said if he issued that order, he was scared of getting demoted or transferred to the middle of nowhere. Everyone was terrified of doing their job.”
Mr. Crum temporarily shut the mine.
In the next two years, he shut many polluting mines until they changed their ways. His tough approach raised his profile around the state.
Mining companies, worried about attracting Mr. Crum’s attention, began improving their waste disposal practices, executives from that period said. But they also began complaining to their friends in the state’s legislature, they recalled in interviews, and started a whisper campaign accusing Mr. Crum of vendettas against particular companies — though those same executives now admit they had no evidence for those claims.
In 2003, a new director, Stephanie Timmermeyer, was nominated to run the Department of Environmental Protection. One of West Virginia’s most powerful state lawmakers, Eustace Frederick, said she would be confirmed, but only if she agreed to fire Mr. Crum, according to several people who said they witnessed the conversation.
She was given the job and soon summoned Mr. Crum to her office. He was dismissed two weeks after his second child’s birth.
Ms. Timmermeyer, who resigned in 2008, did not return calls. Mr. Frederick died last year.
Since then, hundreds of workplaces in West Virginia have violated pollution laws without paying fines. A half-dozen current and former employees, in interviews, said their enforcement efforts had been undermined by bureaucratic disorganization, a departmental preference to let polluters escape punishment if they promise to try harder, and a revolving door of regulators who leave for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed.
We are outmanned and overwhelmed, and that’s exactly how industry wants us,” said one employee who requested anonymity for fear of being fired. “It’s been obvious for decades that we’re not on top of things, and coal companies have earned billions relying on that.”
In June, four environmental groups petitioned the E.P.A. to take over much of West Virginia’s handling of the Clean Water Act, citing a “nearly complete breakdown” in the state. The E.P.A. has asked state officials to respond and said it is investigating the petition.
Similar problems exist in other states, where critics say regulators have often turned a blind eye to polluters. Regulators in five other states, in interviews, said they had been pressured by industry-friendly politicians to drop continuing pollution investigations.
“Unless the E.P.A. is pushing state regulators, a culture of transgression and apathy sets in,” said William K. Reilly, who led the E.P.A. under President George H. W. Bush.
In response, many state officials defend their efforts. A spokeswoman for West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection, for instance, said that between 2006 and 2008, the number of cease-operation orders issued by regulators was 10 percent higher than during Mr. Crum’s two-year tenure.
Mr. Huffman, the department’s head, said there is no political interference with current investigations. Department officials say they continue to improve the agency’s procedures, and note that regulators have assessed $14.7 million in state fines against more than 70 mining companies since 2006.
However, that is about equal to the revenue those businesses’ parent companies collect every 10 hours, according to financial reports. (To find out about every state’s enforcement record and read comments from regulators, visit www.nytimes.com/waterdata.)
“The real test is, is our water clean?” said Mr. Huffman. “When the Clean Water Act was passed, this river that flows through our capital was very dirty. Thirty years later, it’s much cleaner because we’ve chosen priorities carefully.”
Some regulators admit that polluters have fallen through the cracks. To genuinely improve enforcement, they say, the E.P.A. needs to lead.
“If you don’t have vigorous oversight by the feds, then everything just goes limp,” said Mr. Crum. “Regulators can’t afford to have some backbone unless they know Washington or the governor’s office will back them up.”
It took Mr. Crum a while to recover from his firing. He moved to Virginia to work at the Nature Conservancy, an environmental conservation group. Today, he is in private practice and works on the occasional environmental lawsuit.
“We’re moving backwards,” he said, “and it’s heartbreaking.”
Shortcomings of the E.P.A.
The memos are marked “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE.”
They were written this year by E.P.A. staff, the culmination of a five-year investigation of states’ enforcement of federal pollution laws. And in bland, bureaucratic terms, they describe a regulatory system — at the E.P.A. and among state agencies — that in many ways simply does not work.
For years, according to one memo, federal regulators knew that more than 30 states had major problems documenting which companies were violating pollution laws. Another notes that states’ “personnel lack direction, ability or training” to levy fines large enough to deter polluters.
But often, the memos say, the E.P.A. never corrected those problems even though they were widely acknowledged. The E.P.A. “may hesitate to push the states” out of “fear of risking their relationships,” one report reads. Another notes that E.P.A. offices lack “a consistent national oversight strategy.”
Some of those memos, part of an effort known as the State Review Framework, were obtained from agency employees who asked for anonymity, and others through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Enforcement lapses were particularly bad under the administration of President George W. Bush, employees say. “For the last eight years, my hands have been tied,” said one E.P.A. official who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “We were told to take our clean water and clean air cases, put them in a box, and lock it shut. Everyone knew polluters were getting away with murder. But these polluters are some of the biggest campaign contributors in town, so no one really cared if they were dumping poisons into streams.”
The E.P.A. administrators during the last eight years — Christine Todd Whitman, Michael O. Leavitt and Stephen L. Johnson — all declined to comment.
When President Obama chose Ms. Jackson to head the E.P.A., many environmentalists and agency employees were encouraged. During his campaign, Mr. Obama promised to “reinvigorate the drinking water standards that have been weakened under the Bush administration and update them to address new threats.” He pledged to regulate water pollution from livestock operations and push for amendments to the Clean Water Act.
But some worry those promises will not be kept. Water issues have taken a back seat to other environmental concerns, like carbon emissions.
In an interview, Ms. Jackson noted that many of the nation’s waters were healthier today than when the Clean Water Act was passed and said she intended to enforce the law more vigorously. After receiving detailed questions from The Times, she put many of the State Review Framework documents on the agency’s Web site, and ordered more disclosure of the agency’s handling of water issues, increased enforcement and revamped technology so that facilities’ environmental records are more accessible.
“Do critics have a good and valid point when they say improvements need to be made? Absolutely,” Ms. Jackson said. “But I think we need to be careful not to do that by scaring the bejesus out of people into thinking that, boy, are things horrible. What it requires is attention, and I’m going to give it that attention.”
In statements, E.P.A. officials noted that from 2006 to 2008, the agency conducted 11,000 Clean Water Act and 21,000 Safe Drinking Water Act inspections, and referred 146 cases to the Department of Justice. During the 2007 to 2008 period, officials wrote, 92 percent of the population served by community water systems received water that had no reported health-based violations.
The Times’s reporting, the statements added, “does not distinguish between significant violations and minor violations,” and “as a result, the conclusions may present an unduly alarming picture.” They wrote that “much of the country’s water quality problems are caused by discharges from nonpoint sources of pollution, such as agricultural runoff, which cannot be corrected solely through enforcement.”
Ultimately, lawmakers and environmental activists say, the best solution is for Congress to hold the E.P.A. and states accountable for their failures.
The Clean Water Act, they add, should be expanded to police other types of pollution — like farm and livestock runoff — that are largely unregulated. And they say
Congress should give state agencies more resources, in the same way that federal dollars helped overhaul the nation’s sewage systems in the 1970s.
Some say changes will not occur without public outrage.
“When we started regulating water pollution in the 1970s, there was a huge public outcry because you could see raw sewage flowing into the rivers,” said William D. Ruckelshaus, who served as the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Richard M. Nixon, and then again under President Ronald Reagan.
“Today the violations are much more subtle — pesticides and chemicals you can’t see or smell that are even more dangerous,” he added. “And so a lot of the public pressure on regulatory agencies has ebbed away.”
Bloomberg
U.S. Foreclosure Filings Set Third Record-High in Five Months...Dan Levy
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aGAr2pZ9UC1o
Foreclosure filings in the U.S. climbed to a record for the third time in five months in July as falling home prices and the recession left more homeowners unable to keep up payments or refinance.
A total of 360,149 properties received a default or auction notice or were seized last month, according to data seller RealtyTrac Inc. One in 355 households got a filing, the highest monthly rate in RealtyTrac records dating to January 2005, the Irvine, California-based company said in a statement.
“We’re in a deep hole,” Diane Swonk, chief economist at Chicago-based Mesirow Financial Inc., said in an interview. “There is a whole new wave of foreclosures tied to the cyclical dynamics of the economy.”
Foreclosures increased as the U.S. recorded another 247,000 job losses in July and home prices fell, leaving an increasing number of mortgage holders owing more than their properties were worth. The median price of an existing single-family house dropped 15.6 percent to $174,100 in the second quarter, the most in records dating to 1979, the National Association of Realtors said yesterday. Almost one-quarter of U.S. mortgage holders are underwater, property data firm Zillow.com said Aug. 11.
“There are a slew of factors showing fundamental weakness on the demand side: tighter underwriting, job loss, investors who’ve been badly burned,” said Stuart Gabriel, director of the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate in Los Angeles. “We have not seen the bottom of the housing market.”
Nevada, California
July’s foreclosure filings rose 32 percent from a year earlier and 6.7 percent from June, RealtyTrac said.
Nevada had the highest foreclosure rate for the 31st consecutive month as one in 56 households there got a filing, more than six times the national average. Auctions and bank seizures both rose 20 percent from the previous month.
California had the second-highest filing rate at one in 123 households, three times the U.S. average, and initial defaults were up 15 percent from June, RealtyTrac said. Arizona was third at one in 135 households as scheduled auctions rose 25 percent from the previous month.
Unemployment was 9.4 percent in July, the Labor Department reported Aug. 8.
More than 126,000 U.S. consumers filed for bankruptcy in July, 34 percent more than a year earlier, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The number may reach 1.4 million by the end of the year as employers cut payrolls and banks restrain lending, the institute said Aug. 4.
Loan Modifications
About 235,000 troubled borrowers have begun modifying their property loans under the government’s Making Home Affordable Program, compared with a target population of 4 million, according to an Aug. 4 Treasury Department report. About 15 percent of eligible borrowers were offered loan modifications and 9 percent entered trial agreements.
Bank of America Corp. modified about 4 percent of its qualifying loans and Wells Fargo & Co. changed 6 percent, making them the two worst performers in the program among the biggest U.S. banks, Treasury said. Citigroup Inc. modified 15 percent of its eligible loans and JPMorgan Chase & Co. changed 20 percent.
“It has been more profitable to put a home in foreclosure than restructure the loan,” Swonk said. “The only thing that helps is forgiveness of principal, and there is little willingness to do that.”
Florida, Utah, Idaho, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado and Oregon accounted for the other states with the top 10 highest rates of foreclosure filings.
Four states accounted for almost 57 percent of total filings, with California leading at 108,104, or 50 percent more than a year earlier.
Top 10
Florida ranked second with 56,486 filings, up 23 percent, and Arizona was third at 19,694, up 48 percent. Nevada was fourth at 19,535, a 94 percent increase, RealtyTrac said.
Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey rounded out the top 10 states with the most filings.
New Jersey had the 18th highest rate and 6,467 filings, a 40 percent increase from a year earlier. Connecticut ranked 29th and had 1,569 filings, a 22 percent drop. New York had the 38th highest rate and 5,954 filings, down 3.5 percent.
Las Vegas had the highest foreclosure rate among metropolitan areas with a population 200,000 or more. One in 47 households got a notice, up 89 percent from a year earlier and up 6 percent from the previous month.
California had seven cities among the top 10. Stockton and Modesto ranked second and third; Merced, Riverside-San Bernardino, Bakersfield and Vallejo-Fairfield were fifth through eighth; and Sacramento was 10th.
Cape Coral-Fort Myers was fourth and Phoenix-Mesa- Scottsdale was ninth, according to RealtyTrac, which collects data from more than 2,200 counties representing 90 percent of the U.S. population.
Fed Failed to Curb Flawed Bank Lending, Inspector General Says...Steve Matthews
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=atgnqYrMSrtI
Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve examiners failed to rein in practices that led to losses from excessive real estate lending at two banks in California and Florida that later closed, the central bank’s inspector general said.
Riverside Bank of the Gulf Coast in Cape Coral, Florida, “warranted more immediate supervisory attention” by the Atlanta district bank, Fed Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman said in a report to the central bank’s board. In overseeing County Bank in Merced, California, the San Francisco Fed should have taken a “more aggressive supervisory” approach, Coleman said in another report, also dated Sept. 9.
The findings follow criticism by lawmakers including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, who say the Fed failed to curtail flawed underwriting and other lending abuses that contributed to the collapse of the housing market. Another report by the Fed’s inspector general in June faulted the Atlanta Fed’s oversight of First Georgia Community Bank.
Congress is reviewing a U.S. Treasury proposal to give the Fed more power by making it the supervisor for large and interconnected firms that may damage the U.S. financial system in the event of failure. The Treasury plan is part of an effort to overhaul U.S. financial regulation.
“The Fed does not come out smelling like a rose,” said Gilbert Schwartz, former associate general counsel of the Fed board and now a partner at law firm Schwartz & Ballen LLP in Washington. “There are things that could have been done better.”
‘Perform Better’
Other regulatory agencies have also fallen short, he added. “The real question is if not the Fed, who would perform better? The best place is with the Fed.”
Esther George, acting director of the Fed’s division of banking supervision and regulation, agreed with Coleman’s findings in a letter posted with the reports on the central bank’s web site.
Atlanta Fed spokesman Pierce Nelson and San Francisco Fed spokeswoman Carol A. Eckert both cited George’s response in replying yesterday to requests for comment.
The three reports are the first to examine failures of Fed- supervised banks since the credit crisis began in August 2007. Reviews are required when a loss to the FDIC’s deposit-insurance fund exceeds the greater of $25 million or 2 percent of the institution’s total assets.
Eighty-nine banks have failed from the beginning of the year through Sept. 5, according to the FDIC, as the worst recession since the 1930s takes its toll on the economy. Regulators have closed banks at the fastest pace in 17 years.
Grading System
A total of 416 banks with combined assets of $299.8 billion failed the FDIC’s grading system for asset quality, liquidity and earnings in the second quarter, the most since June 1994, the regulator said in a report last month.
The largest failures in the southeast U.S. have included Colonial BancGroup Inc. in Montgomery, Alabama, which had assets of $25 billion, and BankUnited Financial Corp. in Coral Gables, Florida, with assets of $12.8 billion.
“I recognize the episode we have been through, a piece of which is bank failures, is clearly not a resounding success,” Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said in a press briefing in July. “I can step back and say I think clearly we can improve. The Federal Reserve team, I think, has done a solid job overall.”
The failure of Riverside Bank may result in an estimated loss of $201.5 million, or 37.5 percent of the bank’s $536.7 million in total assets, according to the FDIC.
‘Emerging Problems’
“Emerging problems observed during a 2007 visitation provided FRB Atlanta with an opportunity for a more aggressive supervisory response,” Coleman wrote. Stepped-up supervision could have included “conducting an asset quality target examination, requiring the bank to prepare a new capital plan or further accelerating the full-scope examination that was conducted in March 2008.”
The failure of County Bank, in California, will result in an estimated loss to the FDIC of $135.8 million, or 8 percent of the bank’s $1.692 billion in assets, the FDIC said.
“We believe that the magnitude and significance of County’s asset quality deterioration and credit administration deficiencies that emerged in the summer of 2007, coupled with management’s disagreement with regulators, warranted a more direct and forceful supervisory response,” Coleman wrote.
The San Francisco Fed “did not follow Board procedures that required sending a brokered deposit restriction letter to County” when its capital base fell below a target level, the report added.
“Consistent with the report’s recommendation, the Division will remind the districts to provide timely written notification of brokered deposit restrictions to financial institutions deemed less than well capitalized,” George said in the letter.