EPA Watch
2000 budget includes steady funding; policy orders Congress allocated EPA a $7.57 billion budget for the 2000 fiscal year (FY), essentially the same level of funding the agency received last year. Congress also inserted as many as 324 "earmarks" for special projects and directed EPA to use as much as 20% of its money for local programs such as $750,000 for research on urban waste management at the University of New Orleans. President Clinton signed the budget Oct. 20, 1999, following weeks of political wrangling, including a recommendation from Clinton's advisors to veto the bill in early September. In the end, Congress softened many of its demands but carried over several policy instructions from previous budgets. For example, EPA is again prohibited from spending any funds to implement its Interim Guidance for processing petitions charging environmental racism under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. No funds are to be spent on tions leading to the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change; the law also requests that EPA suspend work on controlling the transport of nitroeen oxides until litigation is comDlete Earmarking is a common legislative practice but EPA officials said that the total dollar amount earmarked is larger than amounts in rprpnt years The agency's science and technology programs received $654 million. Of that, Congress set aside $2 million for the National Research Council to study whether clean air requirements, at any government level, contradict one another. The law cut the president's $216 million request for the second year of the Climate Change Technology Initiative, which supports efficiency technologies, down to $109 million. Global climate change research will receive $17 million, just $1 million more than in FY 1999. © 2000 American Chemical Society
The Superfund program will see $1.4 billion, almost $10 million less man last year's budget. Of this, $917 million is slated for cleanup; $140 million for enforcement; and $38 million for research. The revolving loan programs, which provide loans to cities in need of sewage or drinking water treatment systems, will be funding close to last year's levels. Congress turned down Clinton's $200 million request for a new Clean Air Partnership Fund for locally managed programs to cut smog, air toxics, and greenhouse gas emissions. Clinton's program to provide $9.5 billion in bonding authority through tax credit bonds for local governments to preserve open space was not funded. And although Congress removed the personnel "caps" in earlier bills, in the final law, EPA is directed to maintain the hiring freeze that began in FY 1999. The bill signed by Clinton provided the agency with $7.59 billion. But a subsequent omnibus budget law instituting a 0.38% budget cut for all federal agencies slighuy reduced EPA's funding by $23.8 million.
PBT releases, including dioxin, will be captured on TRI reports Coal- and oil-fired electric power plants, pulp and paper mills, and certain chemical plants are among the facilities expected to calculate this year's dioxin releases under a new Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) requirement. The dioxin reporting directive is part of a final rule that amends the TRI to capture the relatively lowlevel releases of 27 persistent, bioaccumulative toxic (PBT) chemicals. The rule adds seven chemicals and two chemical compounds to the TRI list, such as benzo(g,h,i)perylene and octochlorostyrene. It also lowers the use threshold that triggers reporting for 18 PBTs already listed, such as mercury and polycyclic aromatic compounds. For five PBTs that EPA con-
siders to be "highly persistent and highly bioaccumulative", companies must report their releases if they manufacture, transfer, or otherwise use 10 lb annually. Companies using the remaining PBTs must report releases if they manufacture or otherwise use 100 lb of them each year. Dioxin and dioxin-like compounds have been singled out with a much lower, 0.1-gram, reporting threshold. The changes will ensure that the public has information on the quantities of PBTs released that would not be reported under the 10,000 and 25,000 lb per year thresholds that apply to other TRI chemicals, EPA wrote in the October 29 Federal Register {Fed. Regist. 1999, 64 (209)) 58,666-58,753). EPA expects that most of the dioxin releases reported under TRI will be emissions estimates, and later this year, it will provide companies with guidance on how to calculate releases. Still, reporting dioxin releases will be difficult, said Lee Zeugin, a partner with the law firm Hunton & Wiillams, which represents electric power plants. Few, if any, plants now test for dioxin, so the emission factors used to calculate releases at a single plant may be unreliable, Zeugin said. Beyond this point, many electric utility owners believe that TRI data, especially on PBTs will only scare the public because EPA does not provide risk information Zeugin said
Confusion over agreement confounds species protection efforts EPA's slow-footed attempt to outline how endangered species can be protected by die Clean Water Act (CWA) has left industrial and municipal dischargers unable to make long-range plans. The issue surfaced at the November 3 Northwest Environmental Conference in Seattle, WA, where state and federal regulators discussed efforts to better integrate require-
FEBRUARY 1, 2000 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / NEWS • 7 3 A
