USA! USA! USA! redux
October 31, 2006
( I am going to pretty much quote the article since you have to register at Salon to read it in its entirety.)
Brownout at the EPA
The agency shuts down five public libraries full of environmental data, and employees and activists question the Bush administration’s motives.
By Petra Bartosiewicz
Oct. 30, 2006 | ‘When Verena Owen wanted to block the construction of a sludge incinerator in her hometown north of Chicago, she went to the library. At the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional library in Chicago, Owen pored through archived microfiche records and paper reports on sludge and incineration and public comments on similar projects. Owen learned that just a fraction of a teaspoon of mercury could poison a 10-acre lake — and the proposed plant would have spewed 92 pounds of mercury into the air of Waukegan, Ill., annually. Her research proved pivotal in forcing the plant to relocate and vastly reduce its mercury emissions.
At the beginning of such a project, says Owen, a veteran clean-air activist for the Illinois Sierra Club, “you don’t always know exactly what you’re looking for. These were things I just needed to see.”
But now the library where Owen did her research is closed, as are similar facilities around the country. Announcing the closings with all the fanfare of a pin drop, the Environmental Protection Agency quietly began downsizing its 35-year-old library network earlier this month, shuttering its headquarters branch in Washington and three regional libraries in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City, Mo. Hours and services are to be reduced gradually in the remaining 22 regional branches in the network. The agency’s budget has been slashed by $100 million for the fiscal year beginning this month, and the libraries have lost one-third of their $6.5 million annual funding. The EPA cites its money woes and a shift to an online model as the reason for the closures, but critics charge the move will erase vital chunks of institutional memory, and is more proof that the Bush administration has no interest in letting the EPA fulfill its role as an environmental watchdog.
“This is a way to keep EPA from being an effective organization,” says a former librarian with the agency. “Take away their research ability. Cripple them.” Adds Dwight Welch, a union official who represents EPA employees, “The closures seem like part of a general trend of hostility towards science by this administration. They don’t want to hear the facts on everything from global warming to raising drinking water standards.”
The library closings have caused distress among agency employees, who see the network’s trove of technical reports and scientific data as vital to their mission of proposing and enforcing the nation’s environmental laws. “It’s as if your local fire department was getting rid of their fire trucks,” said Suzanne Wuerthele, an EPA toxicologist with 22 years at the agency, who works at the regional office in Denver. “We won’t be able to fight our court cases; we won’t be able to inform the public; we will be much less effective, certainly less efficient.” But the closures are also a problem for civilian activists like Owen, who will have greatly diminished access to records that have proved instrumental in fighting grass-roots environmental battles.
In a process the agency terms “deaccessioning,” materials at the four closed libraries are being boxed up, labeled and shipped to three repository locations, where they are to be cataloged anew and eventually digitized. The headquarters library alone includes 16,000 books, 380,000 microfiche documents, and a vast array of technical reports and research monographs. The headquarters library — once staffed with librarians and open to the public — will now be one of the three repositories used to store materials until they can be dispersed to other libraries, federal agencies or universities. EPA staffers at all the closed libraries are being transferred, and an unknown number of contract employees have been fired.
And the Bush administration hasn’t finished. In addition to shuttering these libraries, the EPA plans to close its Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances library in Washington, which contains unique holdings on pollution prevention, toxic substances and chemicals, and was used to research and craft important new regulations, such as tighter arsenic standards for drinking water in the 1990s. The closing has not yet been announced, but employees report that materials have already been boxed up and stored in the basement.
So far the EPA has been mostly close-lipped on the changes, making a stealth announcement of the headquarters closure in the Federal Register just 10 days before the doors were permanently shut.
Moreover, even as the agency touts an increased online presence, it has canceled subscriptions to online data sources such as Greenwire, an environmental news service that received 125,000 hits from EPA staff last year. When asked to confirm the Greenwire cancellation, spokeswoman Ackerman initially said, “It would be almost hilarious for us not to have Greenwire … There may be days when we’d rather not read what they say, but I can’t imagine we’d cut that.” She later confirmed the cancellation of the service.
The agency’s employees lodged a formal protest this summer. At the end of June, union officials representing just over half of the EPA’s 18,000 staffers wrote Congress to demand the library funds be restored. The closures, the letter argued, would hinder emergency preparedness, antipollution enforcement and long-term research.
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