Amendments by the state House and Senate to water quality legislation proposed by Gov. Jay Inslee have limited its scope and its ability to take timely action and could also now invite enforcement action by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
The gutting of the legislation, House Bill 1472, was reported last week by Investigate West, a nonprofit journalism organization that has been following the water quality issue. The article appeared in Sunday’s Herald.
Last year Inslee and the state Department of Ecology proposed legislation that would have addressed the EPA’s requirement under the federal Clean Water Act to update its water quality standards, part of which was a recognition that the current fish-consumption standard that was set in 1974 of less than 2 ounces a week was unrealistic.
Inslee’s plan, which reasoned that it’s easier and safer to keep toxic chemicals out of the water than to clean them up or wait for them to end up in the seafood we eat, sought to identify the most dangerous chemicals, track them back to their sources and seek out safer alternatives. The “chemical action plans” would have given the Ecology Department authority to require manufacturers to seek out safer alternatives and even ban certain chemicals if safer chemicals were already available.
The House, before passing the bill on to the Senate, stripped Ecology’s authority to ban chemicals, requiring any bans to be authorized by the Legislature, where such action can be challenged by industry lobbyists. Although the bill amended by the House was weaker that what he preferred, Inslee supported it.
But the gutting continued in the Senate, as its Committee on Energy, Environment and Telecommunications further weakened the legislation by even limiting the chemicals that Ecology could study and doing so only with the Legislature’s approval. The bill only allows action plans for substances on two lists of known toxic chemicals and not of chemicals of which less is known.
Inslee no longer supports the legislation, Investigate West reported. It’s hard to imagine how the governor could defend it before the EPA as a meaningful update of water quality standards.
The danger of hamstringing the state environmental watchdog’s ability to require safer chemical alternatives is well illustrated by what happened when the state banned flame retardants called PBDEs in 2007. Manufacturers of children’s clothing and furniture turned to other flame retardants, specifically halogenated retardants made with chlorine or bromine, that themselves have proved toxic and carcinogenic when they burn and a health threat to children and firefighters.
Legislation to ban the halogenated retardants has not advanced this session, languishing in the same Senate committee that watered down the water quality bill.
There remains an opportunity before the end of the session for the Senate to restore the Department of Ecology’s ability to study the chemicals and develop the action plans, preferably without having to waste time waiting for an OK from lawmakers. At the same time it and the House will have to agree on the funding necessary to do the work. The House halved the governor’s $12 million budget request to $6 million; the Senate further reduced it to $4 million.
Fund the work and allow Ecology to do its job.
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