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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA month after federal officials expressed concern about changes at Indiana’s environmental agency, state officials will meet today with their federal counterparts to explain those changes and how they might affect environmental protection.
Environmentalists fear the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s recent move to dissolve its enforcement office, take over air monitoring contracts with six Indiana cities and other changes will weaken protections for the state’s air, land and water.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is concerned too, and is seeking answers from IDEM.
In a Jan. 20 letter to IDEM, the EPA’s regional administrator requested a meeting with Indiana officials to discuss “the nature, extent and status of these changes” to help it determine how they might impact Indiana’s federally endorsed environmental programs.
EPA spokeswoman Phillippa Cannon said agency officials would be in a “listening mode” during the meeting with IDEM commissioner Thomas Easterly and other top agency officials.
“We’re meeting with them to listen to their responses to the questions we’ve raised. We’ll see what happens,” she said.
Cannon said the agency would meet soon with environmental groups to listen to their concerns about IDEM’s new policies.
Environmental advocates and state lawmakers said they are eager to hear the EPA’s assessment of what the changes might mean for Indiana, which Forbes magazine ranked in 2007 as the second-most polluted state, behind only West Virginia.
IDEM’s critics are most concerned about a pending policy change that would both redefine what constitutes serious environmental violations and would dictate when the agency could impose penalties against polluters.
Under the new policy, before IDEM could take action against polluters it would need evidence that a discharge, emission or spill had caused “actual” or “significant” threats to human health or safety, or damage to the environment.
Kim Ferraro, a Valparaiso attorney for the Legal Environmental Aid Foundation, sent a letter yesterday co-authored by the Hoosier Environmental Council to the EPA’s Region 5 administrator expressing concern about the new policy.
That letter states that the change thwarts the intent of federal environmental laws and “dramatically cripples” IDEM’s ability to protect human health by requiring proof of harm before enforcement action.
“Are we to wait, for example, for someone to get cancer, or for a fish kill to happen?” Ferraro said. “That in and of itself undermines the purposes of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. They’re not there to wait until damage is done for some action to be taken.”
Ferraro, who has raised the possibility of suing over the policy change, also questions whether IDEM has met statutory requirements for giving the public adequate time to comment on the new policy.
IDEM spokeswoman Amber Finkelstein said the public will have a chance to comment when the new policy is reviewed by four state panels, including separate boards that review air pollution, water pollution and solid waste policies and rules.
She said, however, that the new policy does not need the endorsement of any of those panels in order to take effect.
IDEM has said that the proposed policy will not harm environmental protection and that the agency’s other recent moves that concern environmental groups will make its enforcement process more efficient as well as more “speedy and effective.”
The agency’s recent changes haven’t gone unnoticed at the General Assembly.
In the Senate, a bill is pending that would revive IDEM’s contracts with local air pollution control agencies in six cities that the agency either recently canceled or allowed to lapse.
IDEM, which is moving to take over those duties, has said that ending the contracts with local agencies in Indianapolis, Evansville, Hammond, Gary, Terre Haute and Anderson will streamline air permitting, monitoring and compliance functions statewide.
In the House, Rep. Ryan Dvorak is sponsoring a bill that would direct IDEM to reactivate its Office of Enforcement, which was dissolved late last year. IDEM has shifted that office’s duties into its separate air, water and land quality divisions.
Dvorak (D-South Bend) said he’s now holding his bill until the second half of the session, hoping that by then it will become clearer what IDEM’s “rationale” for the enforcement changes is and what the changes will mean for environmental protection.
“It’s not a very clear picture, and I think right now it’s going to be helpful to wait until we get some feedback from the EPA on what it thinks,” he said.
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