"Under fierce attack from the political right, and with even some Democrats questioning its competence, the Environmental Protection Agency is facing a tumultuous election year — with rising regulatory responsibilities, falling budgets and its very existence at stake."
As the Flint water crisis was being discovered, Michigan environmental officials tried to manipulate exemptions in the state's freedom of information law to keep secret emails that should have been subject to disclosure.
"Marilyn and Jack Whitcher have been regular visitors to the glacier-carved valley of Yosemite National Park since they were dating more than five decades ago. This trip was different."
The efforts of more than 700 mosquito-abatement districts in the U.S. are inconsistent, uncoordinated, and often poorly funded -- and that will make it hard to fight mosquito-borne diseases like Zika virus.
"Gov. Rick Snyder said Monday his office will release thousands of pages of emails his staff sent or received related to Flint’s water supply switch and subsequent contamination dating back to 2011."
Michigan officials still say they cannot conclusively link an outbreak of Legionnaire's disease to Flint’s contaminated water supply, partly because sputum cultures were not collected from patients. But the possibility of a link was raised in internal government emails as early as October 2014, and state officials did not inform the public of the outbreak until last month.
Grants and contracts are a key way that the agency extends the reach of its work into the world beyond agency offices. They may include an engineering project to clean up a Superfund site, an environmental education and outreach program, snow-plowing agency parking lots, expert studies, and computer services.
Maine passed a law in 2015 that allowed railroads to keep oil-train routing information from the public — over the governor's veto. In the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting's Pine Tree Watchdog, Dave Sherwood reports how the provision was a bait-and-switch.
Bad as it is, the Flint drinking water disaster is hardly uncommon. Even though the law requires authorities to tell the public of dangerous levels of lead in drinking water, they often don't.
"Residents of Flint, Michigan, began getting gravely ill and in some cases dying in summer 2014 in one of the worst outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease in U.S. history, and a county health director says attempts to find the source were hampered when the state wouldn't request federal assistance."
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