PEER — the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility — is taking aim at former state Environmental Commissioner Lisa Jackson (pictured at Monday’s press conference in Washington), Barack Obama’s nominee for administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
PEER and several other environmentalists, according to Pro Publica, are critical of Jackson, who lives in East Windsor, for being “too close to industry, with(holding) information from the public and fall(ing) well short of the pledge she made when taking office in February 2006 to fix the state’s beleaguered toxic waste program.”
(T)wo years into Jackson’s tenure, the new system for cleaning up New Jersey’s 16,000 abandoned toxic waste sites still hasn’t been deployed.
“She identified this as her highest priority, but she never followed through,” says Jeff Ruch, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER. “This failure to perform risk-based ranking for determining cleanup priorities has contributed to the belated discovery of contaminated schools and day care centers.”
It’s not at all clear, however, that Jackson is responsible — a June report on the Superfund program found that the the state and the EPA have been slow to develop cleanup plans for the state’s sites. But much of the information in the report details information that occurred before Jackson came into office.
Many prominent New Jersey environmental advocates say that Jackson inherited most of the department’s problems from previous commissioners, and from staff cuts made by former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, who went on to become EPA administrator herself under President Bush.
“The department in charge of hazardous waste used to have 270 people, now they are down to 150,” says Tittel.
What does all of this mean for the EPA should Jackson take over? It’s difficult to say. But there appears to be enough criticism from environmentalists to create reasonable doubt — the kind of doubt that the Senate has a responsibility to probe — and Jackson has a responsibility to dispel — before the East Windsor resident should be allowed to take the lead of the EPA.
Hank Kalet 