3DDave (Aerospace) said:
Link to the EPA report page:
I hope the EPA is a bit less trusting of local water agencies. I can see where the EPA would not expect a public water company to be run with the carelessness of a trailer park meth lab and a state agency to also turn a blind eye, but now they have been exposed to an example I do hope they do better.
More troubling is that I see no discussion about any other EPA Regions and what their setup is. All regions should have a common set of rules for monitoring the water quality and a common set of procedures for reacting to water quality complaints.
I do see the EPA is conduction training for all regions on the LCR requirements as one of the claims is that Region 5 thought they were required to defer to local authority to carry out LCR management, even if the local authority had clearly failed in confirming they were doing so.
Everybody has heard of Scott Pruitt. Have you heard of Cathy Stepp?
Kerry Schumann, executive director of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters released a statement upon hearing about Stepp's new appointment:
"Before Cathy Stepp's appointment as secretary of the Wisconsin DNR, the agency was widely considered one of the best of its kind in the country. Under her watch, the agency’s environmental enforcement abilities were dismantled, its scientists kicked out, its website scrubbed of climate change information and, under the orders of the Walker administration, she shifted its focus from protecting Wisconsin's natural resources to handing out favors to polluters. It makes sense the Trump EPA is looking for people like Cathy Stepp, people who are willing to sell out our environment to the highest bidder. The consequences will be stark. With environmental rollbacks like the Foxconn disaster, the pending removal of wetlands protections, and the elimination of all our air quality standards in the state, Wisconsin will also have fewer and fewer protections from the EPA to help maintain water we can drink, air we can breathe, land that doesn't flood, and its public health."
Former state Department of Natural Resources Secretary Cathy Stepp has been appointed to be the regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 office.
Cathy Stepp is a Wisconsin politician and business owner. Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Stepp graduated from Oak Creek High School in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Stepp was a partner with her husband, Paul, in First Step Builders, a small company that built about 25 homes a year. Appointed by George Bush to FreddieMac, she is a friend of Paul Ryan.
Absolutely zero qualifications for the job! With no university, no science background, and little business experience, one would have to say that Cathy Stepp is a modern day GOP Horatio Alger.
In 2011, soon after Stepp was appointed to be Wisconsin’s DNR director —with a $125,000 salary — she and her husband, Paul Stepp, bought 4 acres of land near Branson. They completed building a 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom house there in 2014. They seem never to have alerted the Taney County Assessor’s Office about the home, though; since construction ended, they have continued to pay a tax bill of $28 a year for the acreage alone.
Glenda Giles, Taney County’s deputy assessor, expressed surprise when I asked her about the house in September. Since that conversation, the county has appraised the house at $115,220 and set property taxes at $1,117 a year. Giles said the Stepps would receive a corrected tax bill in November but would not be required to pay back taxes because the oversight was determined to have been that of the assessor’s office.
“We do have taxpayers who do come in and say, ‘We are building a house and our house is finished,’ because they want to know how much their taxes are,” Giles told me last month. “In this case, they didn’t notify us.” She expressed some disappointment about this. Stepp did not respond to questions about her Branson home.
