Eugene Weekly : Views : 03.04.04

Defending the Law

Toxics disclosure under attack, again.

BY MARY O'BRIEN

Two weeks ago more than a dozen citizens were appearing before Eugene's City Council, once again defending our community's charter law that acknowledges Eugene residents have the right to know which hazardous substances are being released by local businesses into Eugene's air, water and community. The law has been working exceptionally well since it was passed by Eugene's citizens with a 10-point margin in 1996.¹

The exception to this success story is that a few businesses in Eugene went to court and two Legislatures to screw up the fee system, with the result that small businesses now pay a program fee of $31.65 per full-time worker per year while the biggest pays $1.66 per full-time worker, and some businesses that don't report still have to pay a program fee.

Now a few of these businesses are saying "the law has changed so much" that it's time to put it out to Eugene's citizens for a second vote. These businesses hope they can spend enough on a campaign to convince Eugeneans to either give up their right to know, or shoulder the costs of learning what toxics local businesses are exposing them to.

It all brings back to memory a remarkable conversation I had in 1998 with a representative of one of Eugene's hazardous substance-reporting companies. This person, whom I'll call Bill, was a solid opponent of the law. He had opposed the law before passage, and later had argued against it in court and at the state Legislature.

On more than one occasion Bill had spoken proudly of Kodak, where he had previously worked in New York, because the company had always been careful about its use and disposal of hazardous chemicals. His model of corporate responsibility was Kodak, not this upstart law imposed by Eugeneans on local businesses.

I had heard different perspectives on Kodak's corporate responsibility over the years, but had kept my silence. Then in 1998, I learned that a recent New York State Department of Health study showed that women living near Kodak's facility were experiencing almost a doubled rate of pancreatic cancer, which is aggressive and usually fatal.

The Department of Health report concluded, "When only the women who had resided in the area for at least 20 years were considered, living near Kodak Park was associated with a 96 percent increased risk for pancreatic cancer."

I showed the report of this study to Bill, who quietly read it.

"Well," he said a tiny bit defensively, "Kodak was there first." He meant that neighborhoods had been built in the area around Kodak after the company had established there. While this, too, was not what I had heard of the situation, I went with that assumption for purposes of discussion.

"Well, then," I offered, "if your rule is 'resident beware,' don't you think the resident should have the right to know what toxics are present in her or his prospective neighborhood's air and water?"

Bill simply looked at me and said nothing. I let silence do what it could.

At another time, when he and I were discussing Eugene's toxics reporting law, I registered dismay, saying, "But it's a simple human right to know what toxics are in one's surroundings."

"I can't argue with that," Bill replied. He simply opposed the law on grounds other than human rights, such as the cost to companies of tracking which toxics they are using and releasing, and funding the reporting program of one part-time staff.

In the years I had contact with Bill, I found him to be a person of high personal integrity. I have always been fascinated, however, with splits between personal integrity and social integrity. For instance, I am at a loss to understand how a person who would never secretly expose their own child or spouse to a toxic chemical capable of causing pancreatic cancer or any other disease, will nevertheless argue for the right of a corporation to secretly expose communities to toxic chemicals capable of causing pancreatic cancer.

The Bush Administration, understanding the repugnancy of such splits to most Americans, cynically erases the gulf between their proclaimed personal morality and brutal public measures by giving those public measures personally appealing names. Hence their name "Clear Skies Initiative" for a roll-back of the Clean Air Act and increases in mercury pollution; "Healthy Forests Initiative" for destruction of healthy national forests; and "No Child Left Behind" for starvation and privatization of our nation's public school system.

It's always a struggle to be as good to Earth and all its humans as we are to our own child or closest friend, but therein lies the hope of humanity and the measure of any community.

1 For instance, go to the City's Toxics website, http://www.ci.eugene.or.us/toxics/; click on "View charts" ; then click on "Pounds of chemicals reported by facility and input/output type"; and then click on "Output 5 - Emitted to Air." Then just spend a little time perusing the website, now that you know how to do that.