Environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is challenging President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, and the criminal prosecution of polluters is on the rise in recent months after a more than two-decade slide, according to U.S. Justice Department figures posted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
This means that for the first time in several years, agents from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are referring more pollution offenses to Justice for prosecution, and more criminal cases are being filed.
A search of federal records shows that only one polluter has been prosecuted in New Jersey during the Biden administration. By comparison, at least five environmental prosecutions in New Jersey concluded during the Trump administration.
Paul Andrecola, 63, of Maple Shade, was sentenced to five years in prison after admitting that he made $2.7 million selling pesticides he falsely claimed were both effective against coronavirus and registered with the Environmental Protection Agency.
During the first seven months of the current FY 2023 fiscal year, which ran from October through April:
- EPA criminal referrals are on target to rise by more than 43% from the previous year after hitting a 36-year low. These referrals peaked in 1998 when nearly four times as many cases were referred for prosecution as in 2022;
- Criminal pollution prosecutions filed are on target to rise at a rate 79% above the previous year when such filings reached a 34-year low. By contrast, nearly four times as many such prosecutions commenced in 1998 compared to 2022; and
- A higher percentage of EPA criminal referrals were accepted for prosecution by Justice (51%) in more than 30 years.
“Accomplishing the Biden agendas for conservation, climate change, and environmental justice will all require a much more robust anti-pollution enforcement effort than EPA has exhibited,” stated PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former senior EPA enforcement attorney. “While these latest figures are a hopeful sign, EPA’s criminal enforcement program has become so degraded that it will take years of sustained improvement to turn it around.”
EPA’s enforcement branch, the Office of Enforcement & Compliance Assurance (OECA), has suffered a steady disinvestment that has left depleted ranks of Criminal Investigation Division agents needed to develop corporate prosecutions.
In FY 22, CID had only 161 agents, the same number as the year before and well below the minimum 200-agent quota that Congress set for in the Pollution Prosecution Act of 1990. EPA last hit that target in 2005.
Besides special agents, declining support has led to a drop of 30% in overall enforcement staffing. EPA has announced that it seeks to add approximately 200 positions this fiscal year, but the Republican-controlled House of Representatives may stymie those plans.
“Criminal enforcement of pollution laws is an indispensable EPA function,” said Whitehouse, noting that OECA has lacked a confirmed leader since the Biden inauguration. “Without a serious recommitment to pollution enforcement, America will continue to lose the war for clean water, clean air, and lands not contaminated by toxic chemicals.”
“From a long-term perspective based on twenty years of data, almost every measure of performance – inspections, criminal investigations, civil cases referred to or concluded by the Justice Department, criminal defendants charged, civil penalties or criminal fines paid, cleanup costs recovered from polluters – points to a serious decline in EPA’s capacity to enforce our environmental laws,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project.
“That is a wake-up call the Biden Administration needs to answer before it is too late,” said Schaeffer, a former director of civil enforcement at EPA who cited a report showing that relentless attacks on EPA enforcement have taken a toll over the last two decades. “While the last four years saw new lows, EPA enforcement’s decline really began in the second term of the Obama Administration when the budget ax fell hard on EPA.”
While only one polluter was prosecuted in New Jersey during the Biden administration, the five environmental prosecutions here during the Trump administration included relatively minor cases.
On November 13, 2018, three Flexabar company officials—Andrew Guglielmo, Richard Guglielmo Jr., and Hamdi Latif—pleaded guilty to felony charges of having conspired to violate federal pesticide laws and evading EPA’s ban on the use of the marine toxin tributyltin (TBT) in paints used to prevent barnacles from attaching themselves to boat bottoms. They were sentenced to home confinement, probation and ordered to pay fines.
Miguel Castillo was sentenced on January 29, 2019, to 6 months of home confinement and ordered to pay $450,000 in restitution after pleading guilty to violating the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act by illegally storing hazardous waste at the former Concord Chemical Company in Camden, NJ.
Fuel Bio One LLC was sentenced to pay a criminal fine of $100,000 on February 17, 2019, after employees of its Elizabeth, New Jersey, biodiesel fuel production plant released 45,000 gallons of contaminated wastewater into a storm drain that discharged into the Arthur Kill.
Thomas Toy pleaded guilty to one count of storing hazardous waste at Superior Barrel and Drum Company, Inc.’s Glassboro, New Jersey, facility, in violation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). On February 5, 2020, Toy was sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment, three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $4.2 million in restitution.
On November 10, 2020, Jude Amadike pleaded guilty to violating the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and on February 9, 2021, he was sentenced to serve one month of probation and ordered to forfeit 17 cases of Sniper-DDVP.