Environmental groups say a state science and policy panel failed to fix problems tagged by whistleblowers that the state broke EPA rules in how it sets pollution caps for companies, and that now the state will continue to rubber stamp unlawful permits and harmful emissions.
The advisory panel had two industry votes to one environmental advocate vote, and rejected a recommendation to require modeling of expected pollution instead of more monitoring of pollution after the fact, the environmental groups said.
“It was incredibly disappointing to sit through hours of meetings and watch the slow train wreck of what ended up happening,” said Chandra Rosenthal, Rocky Mountain counsel for the nonprofit whistleblower defense group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
“For over a decade, they had issued thousands of permits without any evidence” that the resulting pollution would stay below EPA limits for substances like nitrogen oxide and particulate matter, said Robert Ukeiley, who represented the environmental community on the panel for the Center for Biological Diversity. EPA rules are clear that a state’s promise to monitor pollution later is not enough justification to issue a permit, even for relatively small amounts of air pollution, he said.
“Monitoring a source after construction is a violation of the law as one can only monitor after a source is already constructed or modified,” Ukeiley argued in front of the panel, in a recommendation that was rejected....
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