Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [52]
This time Bob Martin answered the phone.
A Makah Indian from Washington State, Martin spent the eighties directing an association of Indian tribes that own mineral-rich lands. He represented Indians in environmental fights in court and before administrative agencies. He ran his own environmental cleanup company. Working as an environmental lawyer for Native Americans, Martin learned a good deal not only about environmental advocacy but also about the nature of the federal bureaucracy. When Robert Knox left the ombudsman job, Bob Martin applied and was hired at the end of George H. W. Bush’s presidency.
By the time Flickinger called, Martin already had some sense of how the agency worked. After two weeks on the job he had gone to Pennsylvania to look into complaints about an EPA cleanup. He went to meetings. He listened to the concerns of the people living near a Superfund site and was appalled by the agency’s contempt for the community. “I used to think that the government mistreated only Indians,” he said at one public meeting. “I now know they mistreat all Americans.” That quote made the newspapers. The next day an EPA administrator walked into Martin’s office and handed him a letter of retraction to sign. “I told him that was exactly what I said. I can’t retract it,” Martin said. His refusal to sign the letter was a small gesture, but it affirmed the independence of the office established by Congress precisely to be independent.
The office wasn’t much. Martin had a staff of four, an annual budget of $100,000, and a toll-free phone line. Yet the ombudsman fielded over four thousand complaints a year. His is—or was—an office whose sole authority lay in issuing reports in response to complaints from people who believe the EPA is not responding; or is responding on the cheap and not properly cleaning up a site; or is responding with a cleanup that puts a community at risk. By the time George W. Bush took the oath of office, Martin had more than one hundred active cases.
Martin said the unusual office was created as a result of an unusual circumstance: “Provision 113 of the Superfund Act states that once the bureaucracy makes a decision on remediation of a Superfund site, no court in the land can hear any challenge to the case until the remediation is complete. There is no judicial review. So if the agency makes a mistake, the only recourse the public has, the only recourse members of Congress responding to constituent complaints have, is the office of the ombudsman.” The power of that office derives from its independence from EPA interference.
Over lunch in late April 2002 Martin talked in a quiet voice in a restaurant full of loud Washington suits. “Precluding judicial review is very rare in America. If you are going to have 113-H, you need to have a balancing factor that provides due process for the American people. That factor in the EPA’s administrative process is the national ombudsman’s office. That process was the office of the ombudsman.”
The process worked for Marie Flickinger.
For years everyone at the EPA had treated her “like a bloomin’ idiot,” she reported. She had a hard time imagining that anyone at the agency would treat her differently. “I called Bob Knox and got Bob Martin. I figured he thought I was some kind of nut, raising hell with the agency. I thought he was going to patronize me.
“I told him we had court documents,” Flickinger said. The court records Flickinger found suggested that the EPA task force members had altered their documents. Flickinger had read transcripts and depositions of private lawsuits filed against companies whose waste was processed at Brio. She had looked at state-agency records and talked to the men who had worked on the site characterization. She had even climbed into a school-district Dumpster and learned the school-district