Mamie Cosey and those living near this tiny, industrial village on the banks of the Mississippi River spent years wondering what poisons spewed from the three billowing stacks of a waste incinerator plant they all smell from their front porches. Just two days before President Barack Obama left office, his Environmental Protection Agency ordered the stacks continuously monitored for arsenic, lead, mercury and other harmful metals that the 78-year-old Cosey blames for the health problems of her three great-grandchildren. It was a victory that took local environmental groups more than a decade to secure. But the French owner of the Veolia North America plant, which argues the daily monitoring is too restrictive and unreliable, knew Obama’s EPA didn’t have the last word. Donald Trump’s EPA did. Just two months into the Trump presidency, the plant manager and the company’s highly paid lobbyist — a former Illinois congressman — traveled to Washington to meet directly with the new president’s embattled pick as EPA head, Scott Pruitt. A few days later, an email shows, a company lawyer informed the federal EPA staff in Chicago that Pruitt himself was personally stepping into the process. “Administrator Pruitt is currently reviewing the next steps in Veolia’s permitting process,” Veolia lawyer Joseph Kellmeyer wrote to the EPA staff in Chicago on March 31, 2017. “I am certain that all parties involved do not wish to proceed in a manner inconsistent with Administrator Pruitt’s desires.” Ultimately, the Trump EPA issued a “final revised” permit in June this year that eliminated the previously mandated monitoring guidelines for the plant, leaving Cosey and her neighbors in the mostly poor, black East St. Louis-area community furious and frustrated. To view the full article visit the Daily Herald.
