Lobbyist helped arrange trip to Morocco for EPA’s Pruitt


The Sofitel Marrakesh Imperial Palace Hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, was one of EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s stops in the country in December. (Kevin Sullivan/The Washington Post)
report for the
Washington Post:
MARRAKESH, Morocco — A controversial trip to Morocco by Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt last December was partly arranged by a longtime friend and lobbyist, who accompanied Pruitt and his entourage at multiple stops and served as an informal liaison at both official and social events during the visit.
Richard Smotkin, a former Comcast lobbyist who has known the EPA administrator for years, worked for months with Pruitt’s aides to hammer out logistics, according to four individuals familiar with those preparations. In April, Smotkin won a $40,000-a-month contract, retroactive to Jan. 1, with the Moroccan government to promote the kingdom’s cultural and economic interests. He recently registered as a foreign agent representing that government.
The four-day journey has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and the EPA inspector general, who is investigating its high costs and whether it adhered to the agency’s mission to “protect human health and the environment.”
Information obtained by The Washington Post shows the visit’s cost exceeded $100,000, more than twice what has been previously reported — including $16,217 for Pruitt’s Delta airfare and $494 for him to spend one night at a luxury hotel in Paris. He was accompanied by eight staffers and his round-the-clock security detail

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NJ Bar Association weighs in on key development case


Attorneys from the Gibbons law firm have presented ‘friend of the court’ arguments on behalf of the New Jersey Bar Association before the state supreme court in a case involving the timing of development applications before municipal planning boards.


The case, Dunbar Homes, Inc. v. Zoning Board of Adjustment of the Township of Franklin, has drawn considerable attention from developers, planners, municipalities and real estate attorneys.


Gibbons attorneys provide a summary here with a link to their brief.


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NJ Assembly panel to meet on bills to boost state wineries

By Frank Brill
EnviroPolitics Editor


The NJ Assembly Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee will take up legislation designed to help state grape growers and wineries at 1 p.m. on Thursday, May 3. 



The committee won’t meet, as usual, in Trenton, but instead is taking its session on the road to the Jessie Creek Winery at 1 Route 47 North in Cape May Court House.


The following bills will be considered:

A1046 / S1057 (Houghtaling / Andrzejczak / Mazzeo / Van Drew / Gopal) – Requires EDA, in consultation with Department of Agriculture, to establish loan program for certain vineyard and winery capital expenses. (pending referral)

A1054 (Houghtaling / Andrzejczak / Taliaferro) – Clarifies certain responsibilities of licensed wineries and retail salesrooms. (pending referral)

A1055 (Houghtaling / Taliaferro / Andrzejczak) – Authorizes temporary waiver from requirement that farm winery use NJ grown fruit. (pending referral)

A1205 (Barclay / Gusciora) – Revises acreage requirement for plenary winery licenses. (pending referral)

A1512 (Burzichelli / Holley / Dancer) – Permits wineries to operate salesrooms in certain municipalities with restrictions on the sale of alcoholic beverages.

A3121 (Burzichelli) – Permits students over 18 years of age to taste wine or malt alcoholic beverage for educational purposes while enrolled in authorized enology or brewing training program.

A3344 (Taliaferro) – Exempts certain plenary winery licensees from filing requirements imposed on retail sellers of litter-generating products.

A3643 (Andrzejczak / Freiman) – Creates viticulture trail tourist directional signs.

A3921 (Mazzeo) – Authorizes annual issuance of permit to sell alcoholic beverages at seasonal farm market. (pending intro and referral)

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Giant chicken farms overrrun Delmarva; Illness feared

Georgina Gustin reports for Inside Climate News:


As the country’s demand for chicken has soared—Americans eat three times more chicken now than they did 50 years ago—Delmarva-area production has soared along with it. Last year, the region produced more than 600 million chickens, more than double the tally from the 1960s. Much of that meat is shipped out of Norfolk, Va., the poultry industry’s fourth-largest port, to feed a booming global demand.

Now, tourists headed to the peninsula’s beaches speed along a flat coastal plain studded with gleaming chicken complexes, as an older generation of obsolete barns collapses in the background.


But recently, more residents have started pushing back against Big Poultry. They’re tired, they say, of seeing bucket-loaders routinely dump hundreds of dead chickens into “mortality composters.” They’re tired, they say, of the smell, of driving home on roads flecked with manure, or pulling into their driveways at night through showers of manure particles and feathers that drift past headlights like falling snow.

It’s not just the unpleasantness or diminishing property values that bothers people. Many residents worry that emissions from chicken barns—ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter—mostly from chicken manure and urine, are making them sick and worsening the region’s rates of asthma and respiratory illnesses.


Even though these animal feeding operations, or AFOs, emit climate-warming gases and air pollution that’s linked to illness, these air emissions are not generally regulated or monitored under federal or state law.


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Pruitt’s friends turn lobbyists; Their clients score EPA wins

Glenn Coffee, who served with Scott Pruitt in the Oklahoma Senate, and Crystal Coon, Pruitt’s former chief of staff, hadn’t lobbied at the federal level before 2017.

Marianne Lavelle

BY MARIANNE LAVELLE

APR 26, 2018


EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt flew to a Georgia school to announce that the EPA will now consider the burning of biomass, such as wood, to be carbon neutral. Credit: EPA

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt flew to a Georgia school to announce that EPA will consider the burning of biomass, such as wood, to be carbon neutral. A lobbying firm launched last year by friends of Pruitt in Oklahoma was paid by the forestry industry to lobby his agency on the issue. Credit: EPA
Marianne Lavelle reports for Inside Climate News:


When Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt declared this week that tree burning was inherently a carbon-neutral way to produce electricity, it was a victory for some Oklahoma friends of Scott Pruitt.
An Oklahoma City-based lobbying firm that opened in 2017, the Coffee Group, was paid $100,000 over the past year by an alliance of forestry companies—including giants Weyerhaeuser and Sierra Pacific—that have been seeking federal recognition of biomass as renewable energy on par with solar or wind.
Glenn Coffee, who served in the Oklahoma Senate with Pruitt, and Crystal Coon, who was Pruitt’s chief of staff while he was state attorney general, made the case before EPA for the forestry companies, according to lobbying disclosure reports.There’s no law against friends lobbying friends. And the Coffee Group’s earnings were only a fraction of the $1.7 million spent over the past year by the National Alliance of Forest Owners on lobbyists to press its case with the Trump administration and Congress. But amid the morass of ethical questions swirling around Pruitt over his spending on travel and security, his handling of personnel matters and potential conflicts of interest, it is yet more evidence that industry influence-peddling is alive and well—and paying off—in an administration that promised to “drain the swamp.”
For the Coffee Group’s three members, who never had lobbied at the federal level before and who all have other jobs, lobbying the EPA on behalf of six different clients over the past year has brought in $480,000.


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Pa water authority mulls suit against fire-foam makers

Foam used to contain storage tank fire in England (BBC photo)

Kyle Bagenstose reports for Bucks County Courier Times:


Board members of the Warminster (Pa) Municipal Authority voted unanimously Friday afternoon to pay a legal firm to assess whether the authority could file a lawsuit to recoup its expenses over recent water contamination.

Philadelphia law firm Anapol Weiss will investigate “the viability of a legal cause of action against various manufacturers of the firefighting foam” that was used for decades at the former Naval Air Warfare Center Warminster, said authority solicitor Robert Nemeroff, of Jenkintown’s Friedman Schuman law firm. A subject of extensive investigation by this newspaper, the foams contained perfluorinated chemicals, or PFAS, that contaminated the water aquifer beneath Warminster and other nearby towns.
Several area lawsuits already have been filed against manufacturers of firefighting foam, although all were brought by private citizens. Anapol Weiss represents clients in those suits.
The Warminster Municipal Authority, which serves about 40,000 people, has been severely impacted by water contamination. Some of the highest levels of chemicals PFOS and PFOA in the nation were found in the water authority’s groundwater supply wells in 2014, prompting their closure. Several more were shuttered in 2016 after the Environmental Protection Agency lowered its recommended safety limit for the chemicals.

In all, six of the authority’s 18 wells were found to contain the chemicals above the EPA safety limit. The military has agreed to pay millions of dollars to install carbon treatment systems on four of the six wells. The military originally agreed to pay for the two others as well, but reneged after retesting about two years later found chemical levels had fallen back below the EPA recommended safety limit, Nemeroff said.


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