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Sunday, April 04, 2010
Environment - Indiana air enforcement efforts wane, reports say
"IDEM shuts down mercury monitors: Effort will save $285,000; no data will mean lack of urgency to comply" is the headline to an April 3, 2010 Gary Post Tribune story by Gitte Laasby that begins:
In its latest cost-cutting move, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management has shut down mercury monitors across the state, including at the Indiana Dunes.Dan Stockman reported in a lengthy story March 28th in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:The cut would save the agency about $285,000 annually. But critics say it would impact the state's ability to assess whether regulation to reduce mercury pollution is working.
The Indiana Dunes monitoring station has periodically registered one of the 10 highest mercury concentrations in the nation, said Martin Risch, a hydrologist and project chief with the U.S. Geological Survey in Indianapolis.
Government regulators have a list of more than 200 facilities in Indiana they say have broken air pollution laws in the past three years but, in most cases, have done little or nothing to stop them.In fact, the majority of the Indiana companies that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says have violated the federal Clean Air Act since Jan. 1, 2007, were still in violation on Dec. 31, 2009. Yet in more than a third of those cases, state and federal regulators have taken no action.
A Journal Gazette analysis of a database of violations and enforcement actions maintained by the EPA shows that 210 of the 1,260 facilities in Indiana with permits to release air pollution have violated the Clean Air Act at least once in the past three years. But 140 of those violators – two-thirds – still had ongoing, unresolved violations as of Dec. 31.
Fifty-seven of the facilities have been breaking the law for at least three years, according to EPA data, but have been subject to no formal penalties or sanctions; 50 of those 57 haven’t been told of their alleged violations, the newspaper found. * * *
“(A lack of enforcement) creates a huge incentive not to fix the problem,” said Faith Bugel, a Clean Air Act attorney at the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. “Why should they? No one’s coming after them.”
Even the violations the EPA said are its highest priority – by repeat violators and those who pollute more than allowed – are getting little attention: Twelve of the 62 facilities with “high-priority violations” have been in violation for three years without any enforcement action. * * *
IDEM spokesman Robert Elstro said the EPA’s database, known as Enforcement & Compliance History Online is out of date. But the EPA says it is updated monthly; the last update was March 13.
“ECHO shouldn’t be used to get a snapshot of Indiana’s efforts to resolve enforcement cases, because the database often doesn’t get updated to reflect cases (that) have been resolved,” Elstro wrote in an e-mail response to a request for an interview.
“Five years ago, IDEM had a significant backlog of pending enforcement cases. Since then, the agency resolved the outstanding cases … and put a policy in place to resolve enforcement cases within one year of when the notice of violation is sent to a facility.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 4, 2010 05:36 PM
Posted to Environment