The Center for Public Integrity

When the top environmental regulator in Kansas rejected its bid to build two new power units in 2007, citing health concerns, Sunflower Electric Power Corp. refused to take no for an answer. When the governor vetoed bills that would have paved the way for construction in 2008 and 2009, Sunflower again refused to relent.

The company’s persistence paid off. In 2009, the new governor approved construction of a new coal plant in the tiny city of Holcomb, so long as Kansas legislators backed renewable energy policies at the same time. The state regulator who initially denied Sunflower’s permit? He was let go.

Sunflower said it won the permit on merit, and that political influence was not a factor.

Yet the company’s success is a telling snapshot of how, when industry flexes its muscles over Clean Air Act issues, it often wins. From Kansas to Louisiana to Texas, Wisconsin and Ohio, community groups have fought new plants, expansions and chronic emissions – only to see industry score victories with regulators and politicians.

“We’re not protecting public health today,” said Jim Tarr, an air pollution consultant in California who worked as an engineer for the Texas Air Control Board in the 1970s. “One of the primary reasons we’re not is that the environmental agencies have been co-opted by the people doing the polluting.”

Industry’s influence plays out at every step of the process: From the campaign contributions it spreads to sway policy to its role shaping clean air rules to its resistance to enforcement actions brought by regulators.

Its reach is deeper than most realize.

Two just-published reports – one from academic researchers, the other from the Environmental Protection Agency’s own inspector general – detail industry’s role in shaping Clean Air Act regulations meant to protect communities from dirty air.

Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson released the details of a regulation that would cut air emissions of mercury and other toxics from coal- and oil-fired power plants for the first time.

The new standard is seen as a victory for environmentalists and public health advocates, who have pushed the EPA to reduce emissions from the power industry since the passage of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. While the standard was issued last Friday, interest groups said the Obama administration made supporters wait until bickering in Congress died down so the landmark rule could have the spotlight.

“Last week, we finalized the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or MATS, a rule that will protect millions of families and, especially, children from air pollution,” Jackson said at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington on Wednesday. “Before this rule, there were no national standards that limited the amount of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel and acid gases power plants across the country could release into the air we breathe.”

Mercury, a coal combustion byproduct, is a potent neurotoxin linked to decreased motors skills and lower IQs. It’s among nearly 200 hazardous chemicals, known as air toxics, which have been the subject of the Poisoned Places series by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and NPR.

Iowa’s attorney general is suing a corn processing plant, alleging it has released more air pollution than allowed for at least the past 18 months. Filing of the lawsuit came a day after the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News highlighted the state environmental agency’s passivity in curbing emissions at the plant in the Mississippi River town of Muscatine.

“Quite frankly, this lawsuit was surprising,” said Janet Sichterman, a spokesperson for the plant’s owner, Grain Processing Corp. “Normally, we would just resolve the issues between the two of us.”

James Larew, the lawyer representing concerned Muscatine residents who formed a community group earlier this year, said he plans to file a petition asking the judge to give the plant’s neighbors a seat at the negotiating table alongside the state and the company. “We’d at least like to be heard in these negotiations,” he said.

The plant, which processes corn into beverage alcohol, ethanol, starches and syrups, sits on the edge of the town's working-class South End neighborhood, where haze and a pungent odor hang in the air.

At the heart of the case is an air pollution regulation the company, known as GPC, also was accused of violating in 2006. When plants undergo significant expansions or modifications, they must install the best available pollution control equipment and analyze the potential effects on the nearby community’s air.