Region 1: EPA New England
EPA's New England Office Announces Strong Enforcement Results for 2003; Lead Paint, Diesel Buses and Marine Engines Among Targets
Note: EPA no longer updates this information, but it may be useful as a reference or resource.
December 23, 2003
By Robert W. Varney
Tough environmental enforcement is alive and well in New England. Results from the last fiscal year make it clear that EPA’s regional office, together with the states, is taking aggressive action against companies, facilities and property owners that pollute the environment and jeopardize public health.
The more than $12 million paid by violators to settle enforcement cases this past fiscal year was near an all-time high. In fact, fiscal years ‘02 and ‘03 are the two highest totals in the past 10 years. Especially noteworthy is that more than two thirds of the settlements – a record $8.7 million – was spent on environmental projects that focused on such problems as skyrocketing asthma rates, diesel air pollution and loss of wetlands. Among the projects funded were building a new garbage transfer station with stringent air quality controls in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, installing diesel particulate filters on all of Rhode Island’s public transit buses and restoring 54 acres of freshwater wetlands in southern Maine.
EPA’s regional office also carried out 700 inspections across New England this past year, a 33 percent increase from the previous year. Among the primary targets of our inspectors was compliance with federal lead paint disclosure laws. EPA staff carried out more than 100 inspections affecting more than 40,000 housing units to ensure that property owners and property managers were notifying tenants and prospective buyers of potential lead paint threats. Numerous enforcement actions were taken as a result of those inspections.
But, as valuable as inspections are, they are not the only tool EPA uses to achieve compliance. EPA also provides extensive compliance assistance and outreach, so that small businesses, municipalities and other entities can understand how to comply with environmental laws before EPA inspectors come knocking.
Over the past year, the region’s assistance program reached more than 25,000 New Englanders through 319 workshops and 74 stakeholder meetings. The program also enlisted 111 marine engine retailers, including three-dozen in Massachusetts, in a program aimed at encouraging the sale of low-pollution marine engines. Even though they are not required until 2006, more than 80 percent of the engines sold by participating retailers were the ‘clean’ engines.
EPA New England has also been successful using the agency’s self audit policy to improve compliance in specific sectors – in particular, colleges and universities and municipal public works facilities. The audit policy is designed to encourage facilities to find and correct environmental problems themselves, so EPA can focus its limited enforcement resources elsewhere. Under EPA’s audit policy, if a facility finds an environmental violation and immediately corrects it and discloses the violation to EPA, penalties can be reduced or eliminated. Last year the region had 115 disclosures of environmental problems that were found and fixed – more than half of them at municipal facilities and college/university facilities. The agency also confirmed that thousands of corrective actions were taken at more than 200 municipal and college/university facilities last year.
Assistance, education and, when necessary, vigorous enforcement are all critical components of achieving a clean and safe environment. EPA New England staff have been working hard for 33 years to reach that goal, and I promise that we will continue, together with our state agency counterparts, to strive to make New England a better place for us and our children.
Robert W. Varney is regional administrator of EPA’s New England Office. For more information about EPA NE’s enforcement programs, visit the agency’s web site at www.epa.gov/ne/enforcement/index.html