Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [54]
Martin took Whitman to court. And won. At least, he got to win for a while. Federal judge Richard Roberts handed down a temporary restraining order barring Whitman from closing the independent ombudsman’s office and moving it into the agency’s Office of Inspector General. The inspector general, it should be noted, answers to the director of the EPA.
The restraining order was shorter than the leash Whitman wanted to put on Martin. In April 2002, Judge Richard Roberts concluded that Martin had not exhausted his administrative remedies. Until he did, the federal courts were not the appropriate forum to hear his case. Martin would have to appeal first to the Merit Review Board, then return to court. Whitman was in no mood to wait. Martin was out of town on EPA business when Whitman seized not only the moment but also 140 file boxes from Martin’s office containing information about cases Martin was working on.
“They came in like storm troopers,” said Hugh Kaufman, the chief investigator in the ombudsman’s office. Along with the case files, agents from the inspector general’s office removed all computers and telephones. In order to make sure Martin couldn’t soldier on with only his cell phone and a laptop, the raiders changed the locks on the ombudsman’s office door.
Who says Christine Todd Whitman wasn’t capable of decisive action in the two and a half years she spent at EPA?
After the raid, Martin was ordered to report to work in the inspector general’s office. He could have continued to draw his $118,000 salary by answering a hot line, but he chose to resign. Under the inspector general, the ombudsman no longer has any independence, or control of budget or staff. He would be working for the agency he was supposed to be watchdogging. Martin said he could not surrender the ombudsman’s independence. In fact, he was slightly emphatic: “Never, never, never, never.”
During our interview at a restaurant overlooking a turning basin off the Potomac, Bob Martin looked like an unmade bed. He had spent the previous night and early morning poring over the legal papers his attorneys had drafted in response to Whitman’s raid on his office. Martin is a bear of a man with long hair that frames a strong face. In a sport coat with no tie, he looked like anything but a high-level Beltway bureaucrat. He had been fired while he was on the road and returned home to find his office sacked and his lawyers waiting to meet him. He spoke of all this with a calm, quiet authority that must have been useful during the years he spent fighting bureaucrats. “I would not accede to [working in the inspector general’s office],” he said. “I would never destroy the office we worked to build. So they had to resort to a bold power move.”
Martin claimed Whitman wanted his job because he had gone to the press about her husband’s conflict of interest concerning the Shattuck Superfund site in south Denver. Citigroup owns the Shattuck site. Until recently, Whitman’s husband, John, worked for Citigroup. He had received a substantial bonus from Citigroup the previous year. At the time of this writing he is working for a venture-capital group that was a spin-off from Citigroup Capital. While Bob Martin was meeting with Shattuck community groups in Denver, John Whitman owned $250,000 in Citi stock.
In Denver’s Overland Park neighborhoods, Martin had found that Shattuck was one of a dozen Denver Superfund sites where radioactive metals had been processed. The sealed pit in the working-class neighborhood was the only site where the EPA left the radioactive waste in the ground. Shattuck’s residential neighbors claimed the buried waste was the source of radioactive water in the North Platte River and in the groundwater surrounding the site. They wanted the material excavated and hauled away.
Martin was pushed out before he could finish what he had started at Shattuck. He didn’t cash in on his years of experience at the EPA. He’s now directing a nonprofit environmental-advocacy group in Florida. “I’ve even picked up some of the clients I had when I was at the EPA,” he said.