In his haste to roll back rules, Scott Pruitt risks his agenda



Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman report for the NY Times:


WASHINGTON — As ethical questions threaten the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, President Trump has defended him with a persuasive conservative argument: Mr. Pruitt is doing a great job at what he was hired to do, roll back regulations.


But legal experts and White House officials say that in Mr. Pruitt’s haste to undo government rules and in his eagerness to hold high-profile political events promoting his agenda, he has often been less than rigorous in following important procedures, leading to poorly crafted legal efforts that risk being struck down in court.


The result, they say, is that the rollbacks, intended to fulfill one of the president’s central campaign pledges, may ultimately be undercut or reversed.


“In their rush to get things done, they’re failing to dot their i’s and cross their t’s. And they’re starting to stumble over a lot of trip wires,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court.”


Six of Mr. Pruitt’s efforts to delay or roll back Obama-era regulations — on issues including pesticides, lead paint and renewable-fuel requirements — have been struck down by the courts. Mr. Pruitt also backed down on a proposal to delay implementing smog regulations and another to withdraw a regulation on mercury pollution.


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Nonprofits can now qualify for federal brownfieds grants

By Frank Brill
EnviroPolitics Editor


A numer of important changes to the brownfields cleanup program were adopted with the recently-enacted federal funding law. Attorney David J. Freeman reports on several lesser-known provisions in the Gibbons law firm’s Real Property & Environmental Law Alert:

David J. Freeman
The recently-enacted Consolidated Omnibus Appropriations Act made headlines in extending funding for federal government programs through September 30, 2018. Less widely noted were the myriad changes wrought by the Act to the administration of many federal programs. Among the programs affected was the federal brownfields program.

The major substantive change in the Act was the expansion of the Bona Fide Potential Purchaser (BFPP) protection for lessees of properties. BFPP status exempts from Superfund liability parties who become owners or operators of facilities after the discharge of contaminants, so long as they are unrelated to parties responsible for the discharge, conduct “all appropriate inquiries” (e.g., a Phase I environmental site assessment) prior to closing, and observe certain other protocols post-closing.


Until now, lessees were precluded from qualifying as a BFPP unless the property owner was also a BFPP.


Now, if a lessee performs the required actions, it can obtain BFPP protection irrespective of whether its landlord is similarly exempted. This change will have a major impact on the liability exposure of lessees, particularly those who are developing and operating properties under long term ground leases.


Most of the Act’s other brownfield-related provisions concern the funding of federal brownfield grants. Non-profit organizations are now eligible for such grants. The eligibility of grants for petroleum-related sites has been expanded. The maximum grant size has been increased from $200,000 to $500,000, with EPA having the ability to waive that limit up to $650,000. 

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Trump’s tariff on Canadian newsprint could cripple or kill some struggling newspapers in the northeast

One of the (hopefully unintended) consequences of President Trump’s recent tariffs is that print newspapers in the northeast, already hurt by a changing economy, will suffer a new blow that could prove fatal to some of them.


By Frank Brill
EnviroPolitics Editor


David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, explains:


Every day at the News Media Alliance headquarters, a stack of newspapers arrives for myself and the staff. But with the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission currently considering tariffs on Canadian newsprint, those days of screen-free reading could be coming to an end.

The fact that newsprint is being threatened is the work of one newsprint mill in the Pacific Northwest, NORPAC. In August 2017, NORPAC petitioned the United States Department of Commerce to begin applying tariffs to newsprint imported from Canada, claiming the imported paper was harming the U.S. newsprint industry. But NORPAC is not acting in the best interests of newsprint consumers or the U.S. paper industry at large — they are acting in their own interest and no one else’s.

The buying and selling of newsprint has always been regional without regard for the border. Consumers of newsprint — from newspaper and book publishers to telephone directory manufacturers — tend to buy newsprint in their region, close to their printing operations. The printers who typically utilize Canadian newsprint are those in the northeast and Midwest, where there are currently no U.S. mills operating.


But those regions are not newsprint deserts because of unfair trade by Canadian paper mills. Rather, newsprint mills shut down or converted to producing other, more profitable paper products when the demand for newsprint fell, something that has been happening steadily for decades. Since 2000, the demand for newsprint in North America has dropped by 75 percent.

But affordable Canadian paper has helped keep the printed news alive and flourishing well into the 21st century. With new tariffs, many smaller newspapers will feel their belts tightening. The combination of preliminary countervailing and antidumping duties increases the cost of imported newsprint by as much as 32 percent, and a number of newspapers have already experienced price increases and a disruption in supply. If the International Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce make these tariffs permanent in the coming months, it could lead some small local publishers to cut their print product entirely — or even shut their doors.

Some, like NORPAC, may argue that by imposing duties on Canadian imports we’re saving American jobs and boosting our own economy, but while that may sometimes be true for other industries, the opposite is true of newsprint.



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Former Christie attorney joins Cullen and Dykman law firm

Cullen and Dykman today announced that Andrew McNally has joined the law firm as Partner.

McNally served as Senior Deputy Chief Counsel in the administration of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. 


He  provided legal, legislative and policy advice on a full range of matters, with a focus on energy and environmental issues. 


He also served as Chief Counsel to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, where he counseled the Board on utility regulation and energy policy. Prior to joining State government, he was a litigation associate at the law firm of Patton Boggs in Newark.

In addition to his legal practice, McNally serves on the Board of Trustees of Raritan Valley Community College, and is a member of the New Jersey Clean Air Council and Garden State Preservation Trust. 


McNally is a graduate of Boston College and Seton Hall Law School. He and his wife and two children live in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

He will practice with the Firm’s Litigation, Environmental and Utility practice groups.

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$42M in Penn Foundation funds for Delaware Rver groups


Millions of dollars more for grassroots efforts in New Jersey and adjoining states to tackle dangers to vital source of drinking water

Jon Hurdle reports for NJ Spotlight:

A multistate initiative to improve water quality in the Delaware River Basin moved into a new phase yesterday with the announcement of another $42 million in private funding to help dozens of grassroots groups tackle the causes of pollution, runoff, deforestation and aquifer depletion.
The Delaware River Watershed Initiative got the new money from the William Penn Foundation which launched the program four years ago with the aim of coordinating the efforts of nongovernmental organizations that bring different approaches to defending water quality.
It focuses on eight regional “clusters” where water quality was given a baseline assessment by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, and where the condition of waterways is monitored by experts.

Funds for Highlands and Kirkwood-Cohansey

In New Jersey, the program includes funding for clusters such as the Highlands and the Kirkwood-Cohansey area of South Jersey where local participants have been figuring out how best to work together since the initiative was launched in 2014.
It’s been a challenging but rewarding process deciding how to use the skills of each local group to produce a coherent effort, said Elliott Ruga, policy director of the Highlands Coalition, which is getting about $185,000 over the next three years, about the same as its funding for the first four years of the program.
The Highlands group, one of 11 organizations in that cluster, will use the money to play to its strengths as an advocate and a communicator of the need for better water quality in a region that is the source of drinking water for some 15 million people in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware. It will spend part of the money to create a social media campaign and, in the second and third years of the program, on conferences to bring together the many different groups that want to defend the region’s water quality.
Ruga said the Highlands Coalition recognizes that it doesn’t have the skillset to, for example, preserve land like the Land Conservancy of New Jersey, another member of the Highlands cluster brought together by the DRWI. “They don’t know about community, they don’t know about advocacy, they know about finding willing sellers to purchase land from,” he said. But any communications deficit can be made up within the DRWI by the participation of the Highlands Coalition.
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NJ, others, revving up opposition to EPA mileage choking

Eight-state initiative hopes to have more than 3 million zero-emission vehicles on road by 2025. New York joins the effort but not Pennsylvania or Delaware 

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:
 
It looks like New Jersey is lining up with other states to fight the Trump administration over its steps to weaken tough rules to reduce carbon pollution from cars.
Gov. Phil Murphy yesterday announced New Jersey would join eight other states in a cooperative effort to bolster the sale of zero-emission vehicles, a multistate program targeted to curbing greenhouse-gas emissions from the transportation sector.
His action to join the clean-car initiative follows a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks, as well as an indication that the Trump administration will challenge California’s ability to set tougher air pollution standards for vehicles.
The latter issue is significant to New Jersey because it is one of 12 states that have agreed to require that California’s cleaner cars be sold here. Clean-energy advocates view the program as crucial to the state’s goal of reducing air pollution, including emissions contributing to climate change.

Sisterhood is powerful

“We know we can’t win this fight alone, so we are joining with our sister states in efforts to deploy clean vehicles to advance the health of our communities and tackle the largest source of air pollution in our state,’’ Murphy said in a press release.
By signing a Memorandum of Understanding, New Jersey will join other states including New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Oregon, Massachusetts, Maryland, and California in a concerted effort to implement a comprehensive zero-emission vehicle program.

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