Asleep On The Beat.

• Author: WORTH, ROBERT
• Position: Environmental laws

Who would have thought that the Clinton administration would fall to enforce our environmental laws?

WHEN NEWT GINGRICH AND HIS fellow Republicans forced a temporary government shutdown in late 1995, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner scored points for the president by warning that "the environmental cop is not on the beat?" Her warning worked. The image of government standing idly by while corporate polluters fouled the air and water was an effective scare tactic, and it was credited with helping to ward off deeper cuts in environmental spending.

Yet Browner's image was a little disingenuous, even at the time. As House Commerce Committee Chairman Tom Bliley observed less than a year later, the environmental cops appeared to have been "at the donut shop all along" In a press release, Bliley noted that "inspections of toxic waste sites are down, administrative actions against polluters are down, civil penalties are down, and so are criminal penalties?"

Since then the environmental cops have strayed even farther from their beat, but no one in Congress -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- seems to care. Promoting a new philosophy of "compliance assistance," state and federal regulators now focus more on educating polluters than inspecting them or punishing them when they break the law. The result has been a precipitous nationwide drop in enforcement activity. Over the past five years inspections, referrals for civil or criminal prosecution, and sanctions -- including fines -- have dropped in almost every state. In some cases the drop has been more than fifty percent, and hazardous waste inspections have declined more than any other category. Although many of the worst offenses have occurred at the state level, the EPA has been remarkably lax in its oversight role. "Browner has massively disinvested in enforcement," says one former high-level EPA official.

Environmental officials are quick to respond that measuring inspections and fines doesn't tell you whether the air or water is getting any cleaner. After all, if everyone were to comply with the law, enforcement activity would drop to zero (inspections aside).

Unfortunately, that is not what has been happening. It's true that we've made some enormous strides in protecting the environment over the past 30 years. Catalytic converters have made cars far cleaner than they used to be, and removing the lead from gasoline has made all of us breathe easier. Many nearly extinct species have recovered, and forests have returned to barren areas throughout the country.

But these gains could be reversed if we don't do a better job of enforcing the law. Ground-level ozone, which causes a range of respiratory ailments, remains a serious health risk in most American cities, and in some areas it's getting worse. Many of the industrial sources that create the bulk of ozone-forming pollution are in violation of the law. According to a recently-released study of EPA records by the Environmental Working Group, almost 40 percent of major U.S. auto assembly, iron and steel, petroleum refining, pulp manufacturing, and metal smelting and refining industries were "significant violators" of the Clean Air Act between January 1997 and December 1998. Only one third of them have been fined, and the fines were almost always too small to have any deterrent effect. According to the report, EPA oversight of state enforcement is "virtually nonexistent."

Or consider water. In early September over 1,000 people drank contaminated water at a county fair in upstate New York. Two died and 65 others were hospitalized. If you think this couldn't happen to you, think again. A recent federal audit found that nearly 90 percent of all violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act go unreported. Some of those violations are harmless data-entry errors, but they also include potentially lethal problems such as contamination with pesticides and fecal coliform bacteria.

Meanwhile, 40 percent of U.S. waters are unsafe for fishing and swimming. Why? EPA studies have found that 40 to 50 percent of major water pollution sources are in significant non-compliance with the Clean Water Act. The true figure could be far worse, because, according to a report written by current and former environmental officials and published by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the EPA does a stunningly poor job of monitoring water quality. The report concludes that the states are "free to manipulate numbers in order to falsely portray continuing progress in water quality when, in fact, what fragmentary reliable information exists often suggests the exact opposite"

Or consider what has happened to the coal mining industry during the Clinton-Gore years. Strip mining operations frequently contaminate drinking water, destroy topsoil and forests, poison workers, and damage houses. That's why they're governed by one of the strictest environmental laws on the books. Lately, however, that law hasn't meant much. In West Virginia, the second-largest coal-producing state, federal and state regulators made 470 inspections of mines in 1993, and found 514 violations. In 1998 they made 92 inspections, and found 67 violations. "These coal companies didn't just get religion after 1993," says Carolyn Johnson of the Citizens Coal Council. "The Clinton administration made a conscious decision to back off enforcement of the federal mining law."

The problem is worst at the state level, where 90 percent of all environmental enforcement is carried out. When the states do discover violations, according to Nikki Tinsley EPA's Inspector General, they often assess penalties that are too small to offset the economic gain a polluter has reaped by breaking the law. Moreover, enforcement approaches vary wildly from state to state. This variability defeats the whole purpose of federal environmental laws, which were passed three decades ago to supply a common standard, so that poor states would not compete for the business of polluting industries in a "race to the bottom" That race is on again, according to many observers, and the EPA has done precious little to stop it...