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The Behrend Beacon
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Colleges’ audits pioneer an EPA effort to clean up facilities
by Jennifer Moroz
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Michael Quinlan has done something few
people would: volunteer to come clean with his
mistakes.
The director of health and environmental
safety for Rutgers University is leading a team
of inspectors as the school reviews practices in
its laboratories, scrutinizes underground storage
tanks and pores over records for air emissions
and pesticide use.
The goal is to uncover any overlooked viola
tions of federal environmental law.
Rutgers in November became one of the first
universities in the country to commit to a com
prehensive self-check under a federal program
aimed at making large educational institutions The EPA has been offering industry the oppor-
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more environment-friendly. Temple University in
Philadelphia also is auditing its facilities.
"This is a big place, and no one’s perfect,”
Quinlan said of the Rutgers system, which has more
than 900 buildings on its three main campuses in
Camden, New Brunswick and Newark, N.J., and
at its off-campus facilities. “If there are things we’re
doing wrong, we want to find them and fix them.”
Becoming a model of environmental steward
ship was only part of the school’s incentive to agree
to the intense self-examination. Under an Environ
mental Protection Agency policy, fines for any vio
lations that Rutgers discloses and corrects will be
significantly reduced.
The alternative is risking a visit by EPA inspec
tors, which. Quinlan pointed out, could mean “pay
ing lots of money and getting bad publicity.”
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Some EPA watchdogs, however, wonder
whether such an honor system is the best way to
protect the environment.
Under the policy, the EPA can waive or reduce
penalties for violations disclosed and corrected ac
cording to a timetable. A facility does not, how
ever, escape paying fines associated with any profit
it may have made from breaking the law.
Since 1995, more than 1,150 companies have
disclosed potential violations at more than 5,400
facilities nationwide, according to EPA records.
Last year, more than 215 companies received
relief for violations at 435 facilities.
Petroleum giant Sunoco Inc. of Philadelphia, for
example, did not have to pay $262,600 in fines by
reporting and correcting breaches of several laws,
including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
Realizing that companies were not the only ones
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posing a threat to the environment, the EPA in 1999
launched a program to remind colleges and uni
versities of their responsibilities under federal en
vironmental law. The agency warned that inspec
tions were imminent and encouraged the schools
to take advantage of the self-audit policy.
“These are very large institutions, many of which
are the size of small towns,” Habib Spencer said.
“We had general information that much of the time
they either didn’t think they were subject to cer
tain environmental regulations, had forgotten about
! them, or bad complied witb-them butnot all the
Problems included the improper handling and
disposal of hazardous waste, particularly in labo
ratories; boilers and furnaces that did not meet
clean-air regulations; and sewage plants and un
derground storage plants that were improperly
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March 19th
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monitored and maintained.
While other universities, including Temple, have
taken advantage of the self-audit policy, Rutgers
is the first to sign a formal agreement with the EPA,
locking itself into a timetable for reporting and cor
recting violations at all of its facilities. Quinlan put
the school’s costs for the audit, including labor, in
the “hundreds of thousands.”
EPA officials “get a lot of regulatory bang for
their buck,” he said. “We’ll inspect more than they
ever could,”
That the EPA does not have the resources to do
comprehensive checks of all the facilities it regu-
lates is not lost on the agency - or its watchdogs. In
EPA Region 2, which covers New Jersey, New
York, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the
number of full-time inspectors has dropped from
160 in 1991 to 110 this year.