EPA We re monitoring development in Alaska not stopping it

FAIRBANKS — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s top Pacific Northwest administrator defended his agency Wednesday following suggestions it wants to “stop development” here.

Dennis McLerran said the agency aims to ensure decisions in Alaska are based on science and deliberative review.

“Our role is not to stop development,” McLerran told the Alaska Forum on the Environment, “but to ensure that development and resource development is done in compliance with the laws and in a way that protects the health and the environment that are so important to the Alaskan people.”

The EPA is actively overseeing air and water quality projects in Fairbanks and around the state. Early this week, McLerran said the agency would analyze the potential impact, to watersheds feeding Bristol Bay, of the Pebble mine proposal.

McLerran, speaking in Anchorage, said issues and questions that rise from the intersection of development and environmental precaution can be uniquely oversized in Alaska. He said he and Lisa Jackson, the EPA’s top administrator, visited the state last year in part to gauge the impact climate change has on traditional rural lifestyles.

McLerran’s comments follow a stream of criticism from Alaska’s chief executive, Gov. Sean Parnell. Last month Parnell spurred the EPA during his annual state of the state speech to move on Shell’s request for air permits needed for arctic offshore exploration. Last week, after Shell pulled the plug on its annual exploration plan, he charged the EPA with bungling its responsibility.

“I think it’s another example of the federal government dragging its feet, killing jobs and making us even more reliant on oil from the Middle East and elsewhere, where as we can see from the situation in Egypt is very unstable,” Parnell told reporters.

McLerran dismissed suggestions Wednesday his agency “works in a vacuum” without recognition of Alaska dependence on resource development. Fishing, mining, oil production and other work here represent major factors in the state’s economy and in broader national interests, he said.

“It stands to reason that with the environment as an important part of everyday existence for Alaskans, the application and enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws are the focus of much more scrutiny in Alaska than in other states,” McLerran said. But he said the EPA implements the same laws here as it does elsewhere — “no opinions, just science” — despite public suggestions to the contrary.

“The EPA that I see is not the same EPA I hear criticized regularly in the press and, somewhat, by public offices,” McLerran said.

He asked the forum to judge the agency based on its actions and not on what its critics say.

“The rhetoric is heated, but we’re here to balance the interests and to make sure we do get that balance right. It’s not that the laws we administer for Alaska are any different ... or that we administer them any regularly or less rigorously in Alaska. I think it’s because the work in Alaska is so noticeable because there are so many big and important projects in Alaska.”

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