Under the cloak of the budget crisis, the Schwarzenegger administration is proposing to eliminate an office that has effectively taken on some of California's most insidious polluters, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, or OEHHA. This small, independent office of health scientists contained in the state's Environmental Protection Agency is a strange target if the goal is truly to save money. The total taxpayer bill for the scientists is only a few million dollars, which could easily be funded by tapping a small portion of unspent reserves from existing environmental fees.
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Muzzling the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, a California pollution watchdog
The state's financial crisis is cited for plans to shut the small state office that gets big results -- perhaps too big.
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So why, then, the proposal to eliminate the office? Here's my guess. The scientists at the OEHHA are charged with protecting, as their website puts it, "public health and the environment by scientific evaluation of risks posed by hazardous substances." In the past, that mission has pitted the OEHHA against a variety of powerful interests, including tobacco and chemical companies. In other words, the office has some powerful enemies.
Take Big Tobacco. The OEHHA was the first agency in the world to declare secondhand smoke to be a breast carcinogen, paving the way for stricter controls on secondhand smoke.
The diesel industry has its own reasons for being unhappy with the agency, which declared diesel exhaust to be a toxic air contaminant, forcing emission control measures that have cleared California's air.
Dow Chemical probably isn't too happy with the OEHHA either. The office is likely to propose listing bisphenol A, or BPA, as a chemical "known to cause birth defects or reproductive harm." Such a listing would mean that products containing BPA, which has been used widely in such things as baby bottles and food cans, would have to be labeled.
And then there is the issue of hexavalent chromium, or hex chrome, a potent human carcinogen. Last fall, the OEHHA finalized a proposal to set a lower safe drinking water level for hex chrome, but the new standard has been held up for months in the governor's office.
