Nine United States sues EPA for easing enforcement of environmental laws during pandemic By Reuters

By Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nine states on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the United States Environmental Protection Agency. United States For relaxing a series of corporate compliance and monitoring requirements with federal air and water quality laws in response to the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that the policy is too broad and not very transparent.

As part of the temporary policy announced on March 26, the EPA has declared that it will not seek sanctions for breaches of routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory testing, training and reporting or certification in situations where the EPA accepts that COVID-19 was the cause.

The states, led by New York's attorney general, Letitia James, have argued that the EPA has published a broad and open policy that gives polluters too much latitude instead of using the discretion of uphold "as permitted by law".

"The actual policy waiver of these requirements, which are fundamental to our federal environmental laws, exceeds the authority of the EPA," said the Attorney General.

The coalition of nine states: New York, California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Vermont and Virginia, argues that the EPA does not have the legal authority to waive "critical surveillance and reports that inform regulators and the general public of the risks of contamination "and has not been able to assess the impacts that the easing policy will have on public health in the midst of the pandemic of coronavirus.

Their trial comes a month after more than a dozen environmental groups led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, whose president is former Obama EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, filed their own challenges before the same yard. New York Federal District.

Former Obama EPA compliance chief Cynthia Giles, who last week presented a brief report backing the environmental group's lawsuit, told Reuters that the agency had no never applied this type of policy so widely.

"In the past, the EPA has only lightened compliance obligations in a specific way to solve specific problems, such as Superstorm Sandy," he said.

Current EPA chief Andrew Wheeler told reporters in March that the coronavirus epidemic was an unprecedented national crisis and that he expected "regulated installations comply with regulatory requirements, when reasonably possible".