EPA Reports on Reinvention

"There is not a beginning or ending to reinvention," said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner yesterday.

But EPA's annual report on reinvention, "The Changing Nature of Environmental and Public Health Protection," boasts of greater public access to information, more regulatory flexibility, stronger partnerships with business and more compliance assistance.

"We have achieved great progress," Browner said at a press conference. "But this is an ongoing effort. This is not something that will ever be done. We need to continue to ask ourselves 'Is there a more streamlined approach?' "

EPA's Web site, serves as the agency's primary tool for disseminating more information to the public. Browner said visits to the site have increased from less than a hundred thousand per month to more than 27 million last month.

Also part of the EPA's effort to expand public knowledge: new labeling requirements for the pesticides industry and laws requiring community water suppliers to report the quality of their drinking water to customers.

To ensure that environmental managers in the public and private sectors can focus on the greatest risks, EPA has simplified and reduced paperwork and regulatory requirements. Since 1995, EPA officials say, they have eliminated more than 1,300 pages of "obsolete or duplicative environmental requirements" representing nearly 20 million hours of regulatory burden.

Administrative reforms have also strengthened and streamlined the Superfund program, Browner said. Twice as many chemical and radioactive waste sites have been cleaned up in the last five years than in the first 12 years of the program. Cleanup is now underway or completed at 89 percent of the sites on the final "national priorities list."

EPA is also providing businesses and communities with more flexibility in how they fulfill their public health and environmental protection responsibilities.

Through Project XL, EPA is working with 27 companies to develop and test innovative management strategies. The project allows for more flexibility to individual facilities in exchange for greater overall environmental protection.

Under the Common Sense Initiative, which explores cooperative agreements with entire industrial sectors, the metal finishing industry has adopted a set of unprecedented performance goals. These goals would cut toxic emissions from the industry by up to 75 percent compared to 1992 levels. (For more information on Project XL and the Common Sense Initiative, see "Clearing the Air,", September 1997.)

Browner said the agency will continue to provide innovative reforms and to fight those actions that would "roll back basic protections that benefit public health."

The Small Business Paperwork Reduction Act Amendments of 1998, which just passed in the House, is one such example, Browner said. The bill, sponsored by Rep. David McIntosh, R-Ind., would suspend civil fines on small businesses for first-time paperwork violations to allow time for minor violations to be corrected. Browner said the legislation will allow businesses that commit environmental or health violations to escape penalty.