The Energy 202: EPA brings on two controversial regional officials.
During the August recess, the Trump administration has named two people – Trey Glenn and Cathy Stepp, who each had controversial tenures running the state-level regulatory agencies in Alabama and Wisconsin, respectively – to leadership positions at two of the EPA’s 12 regional administrative offices.
Though they receive less attention than EPA headquarters in Washington, the regional offices are essential to carrying out the agency’s agenda – which, in Pruitt’s case, is to ease the regulatory burden on businesses and work more closely with the states in which those businesses operate.
Both reduced enforcement of regulations at the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources – to the chagrin of local environmental groups who accused them of putting business interests ahead of citizens’ health.
In making its appointments, the EPA praised the records of both officials.
Stepp will be deputy regional administrator at the Region 7 office, which oversees EPA operations in Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas.
Glenn’s time in Alabama is marked by an ethics investigation that began in 2007 when he ran the state’s Office of Water Resources prior to leading the environmental department.
Last year, nonpartisan auditors concluded that Stepp’s department failed to follow its own enforcement policies against water polluters more than 94 percent of the time between 2005 and 2015.
Stepp has run the department since 2011.
Mindy Lubber, the chief executive of the sustainability nonprofit Ceres and a former regional administrator of the EPA’s New England office under President Bill Clinton, said that regional heads have wide discretion to set enforcement standards as they see fit in the states they oversee.