GovernmentExecutive.com

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Wednesday pushed EPA to drop a proposed rule he said would weaken air quality protections for national parks by making it easier to build pollution-heavy facilities nearby.

"I urge you to abandon this unsound proposal," Waxman wrote to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson. Despite opposition from its own experts, the agency plans to change methods for assessing air quality while considering permits for construction near national parks and wilderness areas with special environmental protections, Waxman said.

Documents provided by EPA in response to an August request by the committee "reveal a rulemaking gone awry," Waxman charged. "The agency's technical experts, the regional modeling staff, heavily criticized the proposal and said it 'would allow for significant degradation' of air quality in our national parks," Waxman said.

The proposed rule allows consideration of 24-hour and three-hour emission rates from proposed power plants on an average annual basis. But EPA technical staff said that change "would almost always mask a short-term concentration peak," Waxman wrote. In an e-mail last March, an agency analyst compared the proposal to "allowing a person to average all the variations in his driving speed over [an] entire year to see whether he is complying with the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit."

Waxman said other parts of the rule questioned by agency staff include a change that gives states conducting air quality reviews more authority to determine the period of time used to calculate emissions.

Another proposal in question, he said, would let plants that already received a variance for certain pollution sources exclude those from air quality calculations. EPA's Region 8 staff said the proposal is contrary to the Clean Air Act, the letter adds.

Charging that staff objections were ignored during "an insufficiently open process," Waxman gave Johnson until March 5 to explain his approval of the rule. An EPA spokesman declined to comment immediately but said, "EPA will review the letter and respond appropriately."

COMMENTS

• Waxman is dead on. The EPA is being politically manipulated as many of our agencies are. Good staff in the ranks know the consequences of these decisions but are being ignored for more industry supportive positions posed by the Bush Administration appointees. There should be a full public process on this rule and it should be fonrt page news. Just because he is a lame duck president, doesn't mean he can't continue to do great damage to the cornerstone legistlation of our environmental protections like the Clean Air Act. I worked in the Blue Ridge Mountains from 200-2004and Bush's policy for neighboring coal fired plants degraded air over the mountains to such a degreee that summer views were impaired 80% of the time. Just ask the City of Asshville, how much air quality has improved with Bush's leadership...zilch! laura rotegard Posted February 10, 2008 7:35 PM