Yet Another High-Ranking EPA Official Will Spend More Time With Her Family

[hatrack]

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Christine Todd Whitman flew the coop last spring, and yesterday one of her right-hand women -- Marianne Lamont Horinko, the assistant EPA administrator for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response -- announced that she will follow suit on June 1.

Horinko served as the agency's acting administrator for four months after Whitman's departure from the top EPA spot and before Mike Leavitt's appointment as her replacement. During Horinko's tenure, she quietly -- and by all accounts deferentially -- took a beating in what is known to be one of the most thankless jobs inside the Beltway. In an email announcing her resignation to EPA staff, she wrote of the "strength and courage" needed to withstand the "slings and arrows" that came along with the job.

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Rifle though the news from Horinko's four months as acting EPA administrator and you'll find a long list of controversies. Nothing, of course, tops her ushering through much-maligned changes to the Clean Air Act's new-source review (NSR) provisions: "She could have said no," said Eric Schaeffer, a former high-level enforcement official at the EPA who quit two years ago to protest enforcement lapses. "She was clearly part of the deregulatory agenda. She was I think there in that transition period to make some of the hard decisions that maybe Whitman wasn't willing to."

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"This is the first time that we've had a president and a solid-waste director who were not supportive of reinstating the Superfund tax," said (ed. LCV analyst Barbara) Elkus. "Marianne just spouted the party line -- saying the tax unfairly penalized the good guys along with bad guys. She just seemed to watch from the sidelines without objection as taxpayers increasingly footed the bill for Superfund cleanup, and as the listings of new sites dwindled." It was also Horinko who, as head of EPA's emergency efforts, led the agency's response to the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center -- and who awkwardly deflected (and never managed to fully refute) accusations that the EPA failed to release critical data about potentially dangerous air quality at Ground Zero."

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http://www.gristmagazine.com/muck/muck042704.asp?source=daily

[liarliartieonfire]

1. Is George Bush the "Solid Waste" President?

This is the first time that we've had a president and a solid-waste director ...."