=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #157
—November 28, 1989—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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REILLY PLANS INVESTIGATION OF HIMSELF.
EPA chief William Reilly is the object of a criminal
investigation because he reversed an important national
environmental policy, apparently with no more basis than the
urging of four representatives of Waste Management, Inc. (WMI),
who lobbied him at a private breakfast March 16, 1989 (see RHWN
#151 and #156). A preliminary investigation exonerated Reilly of
all charges. Now however, there is strong evidence that several
people, perhaps including Reilly himself, lied to investigators,
which is a felony. Furthermore, it is now clear that Reilly
himself helped plan the investigation of his own alleged
wrongdoings, and that the investigation was carried out not by
independent investigators but by people who report to Reilly–a
direct violation of EPA guidelines on investigations. Clearly, it
is time for a special prosecutor to conduct a credible inquiry.
It all began when two EPA officials, Hugh Kaufman and Bill
Sanjour, lodged a formal complaint against Reilly with the EPA’s
Inspector General, John Martin, on May 17, 1989. An investigation
ensued. However, the investigation began in a most unorthodox
way: Inspector General Martin met with Reilly May 19 and together
they planned how the investigation should proceed. Furthermore,
between May 19 (when Martin and Reilly planned how to investigate
Reilly), and the time when the formal investigation was opened,
39 days lapsed. Why the delay? Were the principal suspects given
time to get their stories straight during this period? It would
appear so, because when investigative interviews began, all the
principals told the same story and it was a story contradicted
both by physical evidence and by an interview Reilly had given to
newspaper reporters before he knew he was under suspicion. The
official stories abound with inconsistencies. The most serious is
that three officials of Waste Management say they did not favor
Reilly reopening a public hearing on North Carolina (NC) in
preparation for taking away that state’s RCRA [Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act] waste-facility permitting
privileges. Let’s look at the physical evidence, then look at
what WMI officials told investigators:
At breakfast, James Range, who is WMI’s vice president for
governmental affairs, handed Reilly a WMI “briefing paper”
entitled STATE INITIATIVES TO INHIBIT DEVELOPMENT OF HAZARDOUS
WASTE DISPOSAL CAPACITY AND TO RESTRICT INTERSTATE SHIPMENT OF
HAZARDOUS WASTE. The WMI briefing paper describes a “troubling
trend heading for a full-tilt stampede” in which states are
imposing “two types of restrictions on wastes: disallowing
facility development and resisting interstate waste transport.”
The WMI briefing paper says “the first visible domino fell” when
North Carolina passed a law that prevented construction of a GSX
waste processing plant on the Lumber River in 1987 (see RHWN #156.) The
next domino was South Carolina’s move to restrict
interstate shipment of waste. The WMI briefing paper goes on to
say that Waste Management’s facility at Emelle, Alabama–the only
commercial chemical dump in Alabama–is now directly threatened
because the Alabama state legislature will “probably approve”
measures preventing import of wastes into Alabama. The WMI
briefing paper says “proponents of these measures [in the Alabama
legislature] are citing EPA’s apparent acquiescence in the North
Carolina and South Carolina situations….” The WMI briefing
paper concludes, “There is only one solution here: EPA must break
its silence immediately. If EPA emphatically restates its
opposition to these State actions and indicates that RCRA program
withdrawal is the logical result, then cooler heads in the state
legislatures will have something to rely upon….”
So there you have it in black and white: The WMI position at
breakfast March 16 was to urge Reilly to reverse EPA policy so
EPA would threaten once again to take away NC’s RCRA authority.
(See RHWN #151.) The alternative position, which was EPA’s
official position at the time of the breakfast meeting, was to
allow North Carolina (and other states) to pass laws restricting
development of waste processing capacity but to use the Superfund
[CERCLA] “capacity planning” provisions to require states to
develop sufficient capacity to handle their own wastes. The waste
hauling industry fears use of CERCLA in this way because states
can meet the CERCLA requirements by reducing waste production as
an alternative to building new waste facilities, if they choose
to. If states reduce wastes to meet CERCLA requirements, the
waste industry will be hurt badly. WMI alone has billions at
stake.
Twenty-one days after the breakfast meeting, on April 6, William
Reilly decided to give WMI precisely what they had asked for at
breakfast and on April 19 Reilly announced EPA would reverse its
policy and resume the public hearing on North Carolina’s loss of
its RCRA privileges as punishment for its self-protective state
law. The CERCLA approach was being abandoned. Reilly was doing
precisely what Waste Management’s briefing paper had urged him to
do.
When asked April 20 by a newspaper reporter (Jon Healey) about
this major reversal of policy, Reilly readily admitted he was
lobbied to do it by Dean Buntrock at the breakfast meeting. “Jay
Hair [director of National Wildlife Federation] hosted the
breakfast at which I was lobbied to do the very thing that we are
doing,” Reilly told Healey. In fact, Reilly volunteered that
information to Healey. A later interview with Healey reveals that
it was Reilly who brought up the subject of the breakfast
meeting; Healey had known nothing about it. Reilly volunteered
the information that he had been lobbied and it was he who
selected the term “lobbied” to describe what occurred at the
breakfast meeting; until Reilly spoke, Healey had not had a clue.
Reilly offered the name of Dean Buntrock as the person who had
lobbied him; Healey says he did not even know who Dean Buntrock
was at the time. Healey has full notes from the Reilly interview.
But Healey was never interviewed as part of the official EPA
investigation. When the official investigation finally got under
way, Reilly’s story had changed completely. First he told the
investigator he “could not recall” being lobbied at breakfast
about North Carolina by Dean Buntrock. Then he said that what he
had told Healey was “wrong” because at breakfast that day Dean
Buntrock had not favored attacking North Carolina’s RCRA
privileges as a way of handling the problem of state’s shutting
off interstate waste shipments. He told the investigator Dean
Buntrock favored the CERCLA approach (the approach that would
spell serious trouble for the waste industry). We have seen the
black and white evidence showing that WMI’s position at breakfast
was to urge Reilly to attack North Carolina’s RCRA privileges,
not to take the CERCLA approach. It seems clear that in Reilly’s
revised story he is calling black white. Perhaps doing so in
Washington is normal, but doing so in the course of a federal
investigation is a felony. After the two EPA officials, Kaufman
and Sanjour, asked for an investigation on May 17, Inspector
General Martin assigned investigator James Johnson to the case.
Johnson interviewed many of the parties involved. From Johnson’s
official reports, it is clear that, like Reilly, WMI officials
made many statements to Johnson that flatly contradicted the WMI
position in the “briefing paper” they gave Reilly at breakfast
that day.
Item from Johnson’s report on his interview with Dean Buntrock:
“[Buntrock] had no recollection of any discussion of North
Carolina. He related that his company has no business interests
in North Carolina and it would not be a matter that he or his
staff would want to discuss.”
Item from Johnson’s report on his interview with Jim Range, WMI’s
vice president for governmental affairs (i.e., their chief
lobbyist): “WMI did not want the [North Carolina] hearing
reopened….”
Item from Johnson’s report on his interview with Jim Banks, WMI’s
No. 2 Washington lobbyist and author of the briefing paper:
“Banks felt the decision to hold the [RCRA] hearing in North
Carolina was the incorrect action….”
Given the contents of the briefing paper, and the freely-given
published statements by Reilly himself that he was “lobbied” to
reopen the hearing on North Carolina’s law, it is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that Reilly and the three WMI officials all
lied to the EPA investigator, which is a felony. Further evidence
of WMI’s actual position on this issue is contained in a letter
from C.W. Kitto, General Manager of Waste Management’s Chem Waste
subsidiary in Sulphur, Louisiana, to EPA’s Region 4
administrator, dated May 11 (less than a month after Region 4
announced it was reopening the North Carolina case): “We applaud
your recent decision to proceed with the hearing to examine the
consistency of North Carolina’s legislation with RCRA and to
withdraw that state’s [RCRA] program authorization if warranted.”
In this report, we have merely scratched the surface of the
inconsistencies revealed by Johnson’s investigation. In fact a
different EPA investigator named J. Richard Wagner has reviewed
all available documents and has written a 21-page criticism of
the Johnson investigation and has submitted it to Congressman
John Dingell. It is a devastating critique.
Why did Johnson’s investigation of this breakfast scandal not
uncover and examine the discrepancies we have pointed out here
and the many others pointed out by Richard Wagner? Basically, we
believe, because the investigation was controlled by William
Reilly’s office from the start. The official memo to Johnson
dated May 19, 1989, appointing him the investigating officer,
says on page 1 that the investigative plan was “based on staff
discussions with OA and IG.” OA is the “Office of the
Administrator” William Reilly. So there can be no doubt that
Reilly himself helped direct the course of the investigation of
his own alleged wrongdoings, those of his friend Jay Hair and
those of Hair’s unseemly associates at WMI. The EPA’s own
guidelines say that an independent agency should conduct such
investigations. All the investigators in this case report to Mr.
Reilly, so no independent inquiry has yet occurred.
Mr. Reilly himself made many inconsistent statements to the
investigators who interviewed him twice, and these
inconsistencies were never investigated or clarified. For
example, he claimed not to even know that anyone from Waste
Management would be at the breakfast; did he not see the
hand-written note (see RHWN #156) from “Jay” to “Bill” asking him
to meet for breakfast with “Dean Buntrock, Chairman/CEO, Waste
Management, Inc.”?
Reilly told investigators he believed his breakfast with Jay Hair
was “social in nature, not professional” yet Reilly’s staff
prepared him with a 126-page briefing file. Does Reilly usually
have thick briefing packages prepared for social meetings?
And what about Jay Hair’s statements: “[Reilly] was not informed
of the specific issues Hair wanted to discuss,” says investigator
Johnson’s report. Did Hair forget the WASHINGTON POST article he
attached to, and referred to in, his hand-written invitation to
Reilly? (See RHWN #156.) And what about this from Johnson’s
report: “Hair does not feel any lobbying occurred,” which
contradicts Reilly’s own characterization of the breakfast. In
plain terms, it smells of coverup.
When will these matters be investigated impartially? We are sick
to death of crooks in Washington, including those who call
themselves environmentalists. The American people deserve an
independent inquiry by a special prosecutor.
Hats off to Citizen’s Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes (CCHW)
in Arlington, VA, who has supplied us with over 100 pages of
official records in these matters.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: william reilly; epa; investigations; wmi; nc;
cercla; rcra; coverups; malfeasance; misfeasance; inspector
general; policies; enforcement; sc, al, nc; cercla; dean
buntrock; jay hair; nwf; waste trade;