Whitman's Toxic Power Play

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Whitman's Toxic Power Play

Did Christie Whitman's feud with an EPA investigator leave New Yorkers

breathing polluted air?

 

By Justin Scheck

October 27, 2003

 

 

 

 

When Environmental Protection Agency investigators released a report in late

August scolding the agency for misleading New Yorkers about the severity of air

pollution in the days after the World Trade Center collapsed, the response was

immediate and angry. City residents demanded to know why they had been

misinformed, and New York's junior senator, Hillary Clinton, called on President

Bush to answer the report's allegation that the misstatements were due to White

House pressure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But Bob Martin, the agency's former independent ombudsman, says the only real

surprise is that it took so long for the explosive accusations to be made.

Martin says he was drafting a report in early 2002 that would have presented

very similar conclusions. That report died when Martin's office was shut down in

April of 2002, eliminated in a controversial reorganization plan initiated by

former EPA boss Christine Todd Whitman.

" My findings would have come out substantially earlier, and yes, they were

buried, " Martin says.

Whitman's decision to eliminate Martin's office was hardly a surprise. Martin

had a history of clashing with EPA brass, and that tendency only grew with

Whitman's arrival, reaching its height when the ombudsman accused the EPA chief

of a conflict of interest in relation to the agency's actions at a Denver

Superfund project. And the former ombudsman has never suggested that Whitman

closed his office just to suppress the Sept. 11 report. But a number of

environmental health advocates and New York politicians argue that, by doing

away with the ombudsman's office when it did, the Bush administration allowed a

critical public health problem to remain unreported for nearly a year.

" If the ombudsman's office could have come out and said 'this is bullshit, it's

not going to clean up the environment,' [EPA] would have come under the pressure

a long time ago that they're beginning to come under now, " says Congressman

Jerry Nadler, a Democrat who represents lower Manhattan. Nadler, who has been a

consistent critic of the EPA's post-Sept. 11 efforts, also says the absence of

the ombudsman's independent investigation allowed the agency and the White House

to dismiss that criticism as partisan politics.

Martin began looking into allegations that the agency misled New Yorkers within

months of the attack. In early 2002, he held two hearings in lower Manhattan,

investigating public claims that the agency had mishandled air monitoring and

cleanup work and had falsely assured New Yorkers that the air was safe to

breathe. Witnesses claimed that the cleanup efforts were only making matters

worse, re-contaminating schools, homes, and businesses, and argued that the EPA

had used inadequate and unreliable means of measuring air contaminants.

Martin had been the agency's ombudsman for nine years at the time of the

attacks, and was the only agency official with the authority to independently

investigate citizen complaints. Appointed by the first President Bush, his

relationship with agency officials began to sour during the final years of the

Clinton administration, when his public criticisms of what he saw as mishandled

Superfund cleanups raised the ire of Carol Browner, the agency's administrator

at the time.

Still, even while Browner and Martin were feuding, the agency willingly

cooperated with every one of the ombudsman's investigations. That was not the

case when Martin began his post-Sept. 11 inquiry. Agency officials refused to

testify, and even publicly attacked his efforts. " Today's hearing may be off-off

Broadway, but it is still pure theater, " a Feb. 23, 2002 EPA press release

declared, attributing the quote to Jane M. Kenny, head of the agency's New York

office.

" It was outright insulting, " Martin says. " This was the first time in my

nine-and-a-half years as ombudsman that EPA refused to cooperate. The past cases

I had worked on were all very similar in nature. People weren't told the way it

was, and more study needed to be done to figure out how it was. In this case it

was just so much bigger. "

Danielle Brian, director of the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight,

suggests that the high-profile nature of the investigation wasn't the only

reason the EPA balked.

" The reason EPA was so freaked by the ombudsman's investigation is that so many

people stood to lose a lot of money " as a result of the cleanups, she says. And,

while acknowledging that Martin probably would have been jettisoned had he never

started the investigation, Brian claims that the Manhattan hearings " heightened

the sense of urgency for EPA " and hastened Whitman's decision to eliminate the

office.

Despite the official obstructionism, Martin collected nearly 500 pages of

testimony, and began drafting a report which he says would have been critical of

the agency and would have called for extensive indoor testing and expanded

cleanups throughout the New York area.

At the time, Martin already knew that Whitman hoped to close his office. Two

months before Martin held the New York hearings, Whitman had announced a

tightly-targeted agency reorganization: Martin's office would be transferred

from the Office of Solid Waste to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

What Whitman didn't publicize at the time was that the ombudsman's staff and

budget would be eliminated, and that Martin would be required to clear any

statements to Congress or the press with supervisors. After a brief legal

battle, Martin resigned in protest, and his files were handed over to Inspector

General Nikki Tinsley.

Too Late, and Too Limited?

While Nadler welcomed the inspector general's report as a vindication of his

past claims, Hugh Kaufman is still not satisfied. A 32-year veteran of the EPA,

Kaufman was Martin's chief investigator through the early 90's. Now a policy

analyst in the office of the EPA administrator, Kaufman says the inspector

general's report glossed over the extended pattern of misleading statements by

Whitman and other top EPA officials.

" The inspector general never investigated Whitman's statements to Congress or

the public, and they never interviewed Whitman, " he says.

Kaufman argues that, by focusing on the pressure applied by the White House, the

inspector general's let Whitman and other EPA higher-ups off the hook. Among the

agency bosses being given a free pass: Kathy Callahan, the deputy administrator

of EPA's New York office, who told state lawmakers at a Nov. 26, 2001 hearing in

Albany that " particulate matter from the plume can be irritating to your eyes,

nose and throat ... but it is unlikely to cause irreversible effects in the

general population. " At the time, Kaufman insists, there was no data to justify

such a sweeping statement, and later findings show it to be totally false.

McMahon, a spokesperson for Tinsley's office, says that such omissions

are simply the result of long-established office policy. " We don't, as a general

matter, point out individuals by name, " she says. That's part of the problem,

Kaufman says. The inspector general's approach, he claims, is symptomatic of a

tendency for the internal investigators to be less aggressive -- and when

necessary, less critical of the EPA -- than the independent ombudsman was.

The inspector general has also been less effective in getting the agency to

follow its recommendations. Of 16 formal proposals made in the report, the

agency immediately consented to adopt 12. The number may seem promising, but all

of the accepted recommendations relate to how the agency should handle similar

situations in the future. The four proposals the EPA has rejected would force

the agency to fix the mistakes it made in Manhattan.

Resurrecting an Independent Voice?

While Martin clashed with Browner and Whitman, he attracted devoted supporters

in Congress. Nearly a year before the ombudsman's office was closed, a group of

senators whose constituents had been well served by Martin introduced a bill to

block any such a reorganization, giving the ombudsman's office additional

authority and a $2 million budget which EPA officials could not touch.

Sponsored by Idaho Republican Michael Crapo, and cosponsored by such unlikely

allies as Hillary Clinton and Republican Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the

measure cleared the senate unanimously in November of 2002. But the measure got

no further. It died in the House subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous

Materials, which is led by Republican Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, a fierce

supporter of the Bush administration and a longtime critic of environmental

regulations.

Tauzin isn't alone in opposing the bill. The inspector general's office has also

been hostile to the idea of resurrecting the ombudsman's position.

" We certainly believe having another IG-like organization within the agency

would be duplicitous, " says McMahon, the inspector general's spokesperson,

adding that she does not understand how the ombudsman would serve a different

function from the IG. Martin has a simple answer for that.

" My office served as a focal point for the truth, and when you eliminate the

focal point, it's harder for people to see the truth, " What do you think?

 

 

 

 

 

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