Environmental Loophole

A critical gap in state environmental law turned up last year during a controversy over building a hazardous-waste incinerator in Vernon. The loophole involves gathering full information on past health and safety violations, if any, by firms proposing to build such plants. A bad record should weigh heavily in an agency’s judgment about permiting a new facility. It also would be something that the public is entitled to know.

State law requires a government agency to check a firm’s past environmental record while itis deciding whether a proposal to build a waste-treatment plant requires an environmental-impact report. But the law doesn’t require that the state agency include that information in its public notice about the decision.

In the Vernon case a Times survey of public records found that the company involved had been cited for dozens of health and safety violations at infectious-waste incinerators in Garden Grove and Long Beach. Two incinerators operated by Security Environmental Systems in Garden Grove were shut down in 1986 under pressure from the South Coast Air Quality Management District. In one case a company official even brandished an open container of medical waste and told an inspector to dump it on the district’s enforcement chief.

Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal Allard (D-Los Angeles) has introduced legislation to make the law more specific. AB 411 would require a state agency that is ruling on an environmental-impact statement to include information about any major environmental-law violations within the last three years when it announces its decision.

The proposed legislation also would prohibit the state Department of Health Services from issuing operating permits for hazardous-waste facilities if a firm had violated any of the major environmental laws. That’s probably too harsh; a company may have been cited but may have cleaned up its act. This part of the bill needs refining, but the proposal gives legislators and the Deukmejian Administration a place to start.

The Vernon case would have been clearer if the public and all the government agencies involved had been better informed. The more information on the public record and the tighter the laws regarding the application of that information to future cases, the better the public will be protected.