Ohio EPA Process Not Easy
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency makes many important rulings about how Ohioans, particularly Stark County-area Ohioans, are going to live their lives. And evidence points to citizens having too little say in the matter, specifically little chance to challenge the EPA bureaucracy.
That’s because all appeals of EPA rulings go through one small, old-fashioned, overworked office in Columbus, the Environmental Review Appeals Commission. It operates under rules that frustrate citizens who come together to challenge the state bureaucracy. Individual citizens cannot represent more than themselves. They must hire an attorney to come together and speak as one. There may be several purposes for this rule. One clearly is to keep citizens from coming together to pursue their common interests.
This commission also overwhelmingly sides with the EPA, which can’t really mean that the men whom governors have named as EPA directors are nearly infallible. Rather, the review commission defers to the EPA’s interpretation of environmental rules. As one critic of the system told Paul Kostyu, Columbus bureau chief for Copley Ohio Newspapers, 90 percent of the evidence could say that the EPA director is wrong, “but as long as there is a fact established that would support him, (the commission) is supposed to defer. I call that the insane director test,” Sahl said.
We ask the Stark County delegation to the Ohio Legislature: Can’t Ohio do better by its citizens than this system?
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