Government▼Watch Military seeks exemptions from environmental laws
© 2003 American Chemical Society
mentalists are willing to work with the military on sprawl-related issues. The congressional auditor, the General Accounting Office (GAO), came to similar conclusions in a report released in June 2002. Following interviews with military officials, GAO found that “most, if not all, encroachment issues such as noise, airspace, endangered species habitat, and air quality, result from population growth COREL
As with last year’s budget negotiations, officials with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) are maintaining that compliance with federal environmental regulations hinders combat readiness. As part of the department’s fiscal year 2004 budget request submitted to Congress in March, DOD officials are requesting exemptions from five major environmental laws, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Superfund Law, the Clean Air Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Endangered Species Act. In testimony before Congress in March, DOD officials said the exemptions would prevent further “novel interpretations and extensions of environmental laws” that are restricting military testing and training activities. State air pollution control officials, environmental and public interest groups, and former DOD employees, however, say that DOD’s proposed exemptions would impede local, state, and federal efforts to attain and maintain air quality standards; harm endangered species; and push onto the states the cost of cleaning up toxic contamination resulting from military operations. Congress rejected DOD’s similar exemption requests last year, granting relief only from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Although these groups agree that DOD has lost training range capabilities over the years, they point to the urban sprawl that has crept up to the boundaries of formerly remote military installations as the real problem. A solution, says Andrew Wetzler, with the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, is not giving the military blanket exemptions, but “rather giving them money to buy land as buffer zones around bases.” This model has been followed successfully at several bases, such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he says, adding that environ-
it “could apply to any facility, whether it’s military or not, where research development tests and evaluation took place,” meaning that nonmilitary entities such as defense contractors and manufacturing facilities could conceivably be exempt. Currently, the military controls more than 25 million acres nationwide, and, if Congress passes the exemptions, they would extend to overseas bases and ranges, adds Bruce Eilerts, a former DOD environmental compliance official now working for the state of Arizona. KRIS CHRISTEN
and urbanization.” But despite the fact that urban encroachment has required the military to modify its operations, the report noted, “very few [military] units reported being unable to achieve combat-ready status due to inadequate training areas.” Moreover, GAO investigators found that DOD doesn’t have a good system for measuring readiness and that DOD has limited data indicating encroachment’s effects on operating costs. DOD officials maintain that the exemptions would only apply to military activities directly related to combat. Lisa Harrison, an EPA spokesperson, concurs, noting they would preserve EPA and state authority to respond immediately to any situation that may present a threat. Others, including Lenny Siegel, executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, say the proposal language is so ambiguous that
NSF gets big increase The U.S. Congress appropriated $5.35 billion to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for fiscal year 2003 (FY ’03), which is the largest budget in the agency’s history. The funding, signed by President Bush, is a 6% increase over his request, an 11.4% increase over FY ’02 appropriation, and falls just $200 million short of Congress’s 2002 recommendation to double the NSF budget in five years. For the first time, the National Science Board, NSF’s 24-member governing body and science policy adviser to the president and Congress, has its own $3.5 million account. Controversial transfers of environmental programs from EPA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Geological Survey were vetoed early in the budget process, but several major environmental research equipment projects and initiatives came through. Earthscope, a project for monitoring events like earthquakes in North America, received $30 million for startup costs. NSF had not requested money for the High-Performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research (HIAPER), a plane equipped to study the tropopause, this year, but received $25.5 million. On the other hand, Congress decided “without prejudice” that the National Ecological Observation
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Network (NEON), a group of 10 observatories across the country, would not receive any money for the second year in a row. The Nanotechnology Initiative got $219.8 million. Biocomplexity in the Environment, a priority area funding such studies as microbial genomics and ecology of infectious disease, received $68.9 million. Graduate fellowships were set at $27,500 for FY ’03. NSF ended up with more money appropriated overall than requested because the law calling for its budget to double passed almost a year after the initial FY ’03 request. However, in preparation for a “multiyear buildup of financial support for NSF”, Congress allocated $1 million within the salaries and expenses account for FY ’03 for a review by the National Academy of Public Administration of the agency’s “organizational, programmatic, and personnel structures”. In light of the appropriations, the FY ’04 request of $5.48 billion becomes only a 2.5% increase. RACHEL PETKEWICH
Mexico, U.S. unveil border cleanup plan In an effort to clean up pollution generated by rapid growth and lax environmental enforcement on their shared border, officials from the United States and Mexico released the Border 2012 program on April 4 in Tijuana, Mexico. Participants in the voluntary, 10-year plan laud its clear and measurable goals to protect the environment and public health. But neither country has dedicated funds specifically for the plan’s implementation, leaving participants, including local and state environmental officials, nonprofit organizations, and academics, concerned that the program could be hamstrung by a lack of funds. Border 2012 recruits local, state, and federal officials to integrate environmental solutions across each of four border regions. This regional, bottom-up approach is an improvement over the program’s predecessor, Border XXI, which relied mainly on federal employees from each country to coordinate actions across the whole border on separate water, air, and land pollution threats, says Gina Weber, U.S.–Mexico border coordinator at EPA Region 6 in Dallas, Texas. The new program aims to achieve
its goals by 2012. For example, transboundary surface waters will meet a majority of water quality standards by 2012. Other objectives to protect air include a general target to pull air emissions down closer to U.S. and Mexican national ambient air quality standards, which are similar. Responding to citizen complaints will encourage increased compliance with environmental laws, especially in Mexico where compliance is poor. Other goals address waste disposal on land, environmental health, and preventing chemical emergencies.
Rick Van Schoik of the Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues have estimated that the border area needs $8.5 billion to build facilities to just treat water, wastewater, and solid waste. But current funding for these projects from the North American Development Bank’s Border Environment Infrastructure Fund is just $50 million. More information on the plan can be found at www.epa.gov/usmexicoborder. JANET PELLEY
EPA on sewage sludge The U.S. EPA’s most recent proposal to improve the quality of its regulations restricting land application of sewage sludge falls short, say several members of the National Research Council (NRC) committee who reviewed the rules. In a July 2002 report, NRC committee members advised EPA to update the science behind its regulations, paying particular attention to concerns that pathogens in sludge are making people and animals sick. The committee also advised EPA to make sure that existing rules for applying sludge are enforced. EPA published a response to the NRC’s ideas on April 9 (Fed. Reg. 2003,
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68, 17,379–17,395). Shortly afterward, NRC committee member Greg Kester noted that EPA had assembled a laudable list of proposed actions in its response but failed to provide the money for the research or improved enforcement. “One of the strongest recommendations of the report and findings of the committee was the need for EPA to increase the resources dedicated to oversight of the program,” says Kester, who oversees Wisconsin’s biosolids program. The report also recommended that EPA officials find out more about pathogens in sludge and investigate and track complaints that the land application of sludge is making people sick. In EPA’s response, agency officials wrote that they plan to initiate talks with other government agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about ways to cooperatively track and investigate health complaints. Scientists from EPA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection are also planning to study sludge exposure at five biosolids research sites. But EPA will not follow the NRC recommendation to conduct epidemiological investigations of exposed populations. Without these data to focus the investigations, these exposure studies will be looking at the same pathogens that have been looked at before, says NRC committee member Ellen Harrison, director of the Cornell University Waste Management Institute. In its response, EPA wrote that targeted exposure studies to address specific questions were better than epidemiological studies because these are complex, costly, and time consuming. More rigorous enforcement of the current standards is also needed, according to the NRC report, which echoed previous findings of EPA Inspector General (IG) investigations. But the EPA response reiterates the agency’s long-standing position that such staffing is related to risk and is currently appropriate. To Kester, this response flies in the face of the NRC committee’s and the IG’s recommendations. “EPA needs to double or triple its staff to do the job right,” he says. REBECCA RENNER
