After the last eight years of the Bush administration's environmental policies, it is difficult not to feel a sense of relief over their imminent departure. But I would be a lot more optimistic if I had not read New Jersey environmentalist Bill Wolfe's comments about Lisa Jackson, Obama's choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency and her record in New Jersey:
I praised her nomination by Corzine as [Dept. of Environmental Protection] Commissioner. At the time, I felt that Jackson might help take some of the politics out of the scientific and regulatory policy decision-making at DEP, which had become overly politicized and media driven.
Unfortunately, things did not work out as Wolfe had hoped.
She presided over three years of budget and staff cuts -- admittedly a situation in which it is difficult for an agency head to shine. More troubling is that she seems to have allowed her Assistant Commissioner for Site Remediation to continue to, in Wolfe's words, "badly mismanage" the toxic site cleanup program. She also made some other moves that Wolfe finds questionable.
However, what led Wolfe to rethink his view of Jackson was her actions in the Kiddie Kollege mercury poisoning case, where about 60 toddlers were poisoned by mercury in a daycare center that was a DEP regulated former thermometer factory.According to Jackson:
As soon as the DEP discovered that the formerly abandoned site was housing a day care center, inspectors moved in, took samples and shut it down," said DEP Commissioner Lisa P. Jackson. "We remain committed to working with the AG's office and DHSS to get to the bottom of this egregious and unconscionable situation. A day care center should be a safe haven -- not a room full of toxic mercury."
Sounds good. Except that Wolfe says that
Jackson knew that DEP failed to enforce a 1995 cleanup Order and that DEP "discovered" the problem at the day care center during the first week of April 2006. But instead of acting immediately ... DEP quietly negotiated a voluntary cleanup agreement with the owner and waited over 14 weeks before they sampled and notified parents on July 28, 2008.
According to the New York Times,
the site remained contaminated, and as far as the department knew, unoccupied, until inspectors visited it in April and found that Kiddie Kollege, a day care center serving children as young as 8 months old, was operating in the building. Yet the center, which is in Franklin Township, was allowed to remain open for more than three months, until state environmental investigators determined in late July that the site was still contaminated.
There's always at least two sides to every story, and we haven't heard from Jackson's supporters about this case. But if this is an accurate recounting of events then I have to wonder what the Obama team thinks of this case and this nominee.