Concerns About a State Office : Has environmental hazards agency betrayed its mission?

Monday’s legislative oversight hearing in Sacramento raised more troubling questions than it answered about the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

Has this state agency, with primary responsibility for assessing the public health risks of environmental toxins, watered down and delayed issuing the findings of its own researchers? Is the office trying to muzzle its scientists and physicians by insisting that they obtain permission before speaking at universities or symposiums to which they are invited? And is the agency straying from its mission of providing regulators and the public with unvarnished information on the adverse health effects of exposure to pesticides, lead or other toxic chemicals? Is it instead trying, subtly, to balance its scientific conclusions on risks against the cost to industry of restrictive rules to counter those risks?

The office director, Dr. Richard Becker, vigorously denies such assertions. But festering concerns, raised by agency scientists and outside groups, prompted the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality to hold Monday’s one-day hearing into the office’s activities.

Concerns about agency management and morale have been amplified by the office’s ill-considered records retention policy, adopted last April. Curiously named, that policy actually required scientists to destroy documents at odds with the agency’s final recommendations on the health risk of a particular toxin. The destruction order has since been rescinded, but not before Becker admitted that some data were dumped.

California has long been considered a leader in environmental research, a reputation based on the integrity of its scientists and their methods. Regulatory agencies, not the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, are the place to consider legitimate concerns about the cost of environmental rules. Neither the public, nor ultimately business, is well-served by bad science.