Copyright 1998 THE DETROIT NEWS
"EPA keeps key documents secret: They contradict new agency policy on environmental justice"
By David Mastio
Detroit News Washington Bureau
July 17, 1998

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency continues to conceal important internal documents dealing with its new policy melding environmental regulation with civil rights issues, a Detroit News investigation has found. The revelation comes as EPA chief Carol Browner and her staff meet with mayors from around the country in Detroit today to discuss the mayors' opposition to the agency's "environmental justice" policy.

According to EPA staff, the agency refused to release more than 1,000 pages of environmental justice documents requested by a congressional committee investigating the issue. Among those documents was a study casting doubt on charges that environmental laws were enforced more strictly in predominantly white communities than in black neighborhoods.

That study, according to staffers, was turned over to Congress only after the EPA learned The Detroit News had obtained a copy. The completed reports for as many as six investigations of environmental discrimination charges also are being withheld from public view based on attorney-client privilege," though an EPA spokesman said congressional investigators will be allowed to see the documents.

Some of the investigations have been completed for more than two years, and all exonerate the companies and state agencies charged with infractions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, according to EPA documents.

"Apparently mistrust in the EPA is rarely misplaced," said U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Dearborn, who has long disputed some of the agency's environmental justice conclusions.

The EPA environmental justice push, documented in a continuing series of reports by The Detroit News, is opposed by a growing bipartisan coalition of mayors, governors, congressmen and business groups. These critics contend the regulations would stifle development in inner-city minority areas and instead push those jobs to places where whites make up the majority.

The information found in those internal studies and investigations is particularly important as Browner meets with the mayors today to iron out their differences on the policy. Congressional critics question how much progress can be made if the EPA isn't releasing all of the information it has on the subject.

"The EPA is walking away from its responsibilities on disclosure," said U.S. Rep. Joseph Knollenberg, R-Bloomfield Hills. "After all this, I don't trust them farther than I can throw them."

Michigan investigation

It's not just Congress that isn't satisfied the EPA is sharing all it knows. Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality had to file a freedom of information request with the EPA earlier this month because the state agency still didn't have the most basic documentation about the charges the EPA leveled against it four years ago. that complaint filed with the EPA concerns an electrical plant built in Genessee County on the northern edge of Flint.

"It is impossible to respond or assist in this investigation ... without knowing what the specific complaint is, or what evidence allegedly exists to support the complaint," according to the letter from Barbara Rosenbaum, an enforcement supervisor at the environmental department. "I'm just tired of this," she said, noting that the EPA keeps asking for information unrelated to the Flint power plant but won't say why the agency wants it.

What Rosenbaum did not know was that the EPA completed an investigation clearing her department of the discrimination charge more than two years ago. That decision has languished at the highest levels of the EPA while it is reinvestigated by another lawyer, EPA staffers and documents confirm. The EPA is in no hurry to complete the new work. Little has happened on the investigation over the past 18 months as the agency has focused on a more pressing Louisiana dispute. Carlton Waterhouse, the Atlanta lawyer who is assigned to the Flint case spent half the time since being assigned to investigate the Michigan DEQ working a flexible schedule so he could pursue a theology degree, an EPA spokeswoman confirms.

Rosenbaum was not the only one kept in the dark. In late 1997, three Michigan congressmen, including Dingell, wrote a letter to the EPA asking about the federal investigation of the Flint plant. The EPA's reply made no mention of the completed staff investigation and draft decision.

Analysis undisclosed

Those hidden investigations are only the beginning of the information the EPA has tried to keep from public view. In May, The Detroit News obtained a previously undisclosed EPA analysis showing that studies concluding toxic waste dumps were overwhelmingly located in minority neighborhoods were largely false.

Now The News has obtained EPA research withheld from the public for more than five years. Statistician Bernard Siskin, who previously worked with the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on civil rights cases, was hired to analyze the statistics used by The National Law Journal in a highly influential 1992 article that accused the EPA of enforcing environmental laws more vigorously in white than in black neighborhoods.

The charges made in the article led to extensive press coverage, Congressional hearings and an investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. However, the EPA research reveals every charge in the Journal report was either "statistically insignificant" or false. In one case, the Journal reported a "racial gap in Clean Air Act Enforcement" but Siskin's analysis found that black neighborhoods actually benefited from stricter enforcement. In another case, the Journal charged the EPA was slow to act on contaminated sites in black neighborhoods. Siskin found their charge totally false due to the fact that the Journal didn't have the correct dates.

Bad findings still influential

Despite Siskin's finding, the National Law Journal study continues to be influential to this day, primarily because the EPA never released Siskin's report. As late as Thursday, the Congressional Black Caucus cited the Journal's findings as support for their call on the EPA to tighten its environmental justice standards.

More importantly, EPA documents show the National Law Journal article still was influential inside the EPA in the years after the article was discredited. The EPA's Office of Solid Waste cited the research in its "Environmental Justice Action Agenda." The research also was cited in other EPA documents and at EPA meetings in 1995, 1996 and 1997, including one dealing with the regulation of auto manufacturing.

EPA spokesman Dave Cohen said the decision to withhold the Siskin study was a "bureaucratic snafu" and that EPA lawyers thought Congress was only interested in "final" reports, while the Siskin study was marked "draft." But all documents that have not been made public are marked "draft" to avoid disclosure, EPA staffers said.

"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," said Christopher Foreman, a political scientist at the centrist Brookings Institution who has been following this issue since 1994. "Even congressmen who can't spell environmental justice are going to understand this."

For more information, see "EPA bungling leaves 'environmental justice' elusive"