EPA accused of hiding enviro justice documents

The Environmental Protection Agency "continues to conceal important internal documents dealing with its new policy melding environmental regulation with civil rights issues," the Detroit News reports.

EPA staff say the agency initially refused to release more than 1,000 pages of material sought by a congressional committee studying the fiscal impacts of the agency's new policy.

The documents included a study "casting doubt" on charges that environmental laws are more strictly enforced in predominantly white communities. The research by statistician Bernard Siskin, who worked with the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, found that federal Clean Air Act regulations were actually more strictly enforced in some predominately African-American neighborhoods than in non-minority neighborhoods.

The EPA eventually turned over the research to the House Commerce Committee, and EPA spokesperson Dave Cohen said the initial decision to withhold the Siskin study was a "bureaucratic snafu."

The agency also has not turned over reports of as many as six environmental discrimination investigations, all of which the Detroit News says "exonerate the companies and state agencies charged with infractions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act," based on EPA documents. The EPA has refused to release the documents on the basis of attorney-client privilege.

Christopher Foreman of the Brookings Institution: "When you're covering up information and hiding the results of investigations, the issue becomes runaway bureaucracy and then you're in major hot water" (David Mastio, Detroit News, 7/17).

The Detroit News also reports that the Congressional Black Caucus is calling on the EPA to "strictly enforce its rules making excess pollution in minority areas a civil rights violation."

Almost all of the 38 caucus members have signed a letter urging EPA Administrator Carol Browner to deny Shintech Inc. permission to build a plastics plant in a largely African-American community in rural Louisiana. The letter also urges Browner to revise recent guidelines for the agency's environmental justice policy "to make them even more protective of minorities."