The following article by Malcolm Burnley was posted on the Politico website December 6, 2017:
It’s one of the dirtiest places in America. Former residents of Tar Creek, Oklahoma, want to know why Trump’s EPA chief didn’t prosecute allegations of wrongdoing during a federal buyout program.
PICHER, Okla. — Tar Creek, Oklahoma, is breathtaking in a terrible way: At one time the world’s deepest source of lead and zinc, the three-town region is now a cratered landscape so poisonous that no one, aside from 10 holdouts, can live there. Mountains of ashlike “chat,” a toxic residue from lead-zinc milling, rise majestically among the remains of homes torn from their foundations. Abandoned pets forage around the ruins. A child’s teddy bear lies sprawled in a ghostly living room. A gorilla statue fronts an empty high school, atop a sign proclaiming “1A Football State Champs, 1984.”
Tar Creek is also part of the environmental legacy of one of the state’s—and nation’s—leading politicians, Senator Jim Inhofe, and his longtime ally, Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general who is now head of President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. After the EPA struggled to clean up the area, in 2006, Inhofe endorsed a plan in which a trust overseen by local citizens would use federal dollars to purchase homes and businesses in the toxic region so residents could move elsewhere. Then, when the plan proved so problematic that it spawned more than a half-dozen civil lawsuits and an audit into possible criminal wrongdoing, Pruitt, as the state’s attorney general, invoked an exception to state freedom-of-information laws to keep the audit from being an open public record.
Now, that decision is coming into new light as many Oklahomans clamor for the audit to be released, suggesting that its revelations will prove embarrassing to Inhofe, who played a key role in designing the buyout plan, and cast doubt on Pruitt’s decision not to move forward with charges. Last week, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit called the Campaign for Accountability raised the stakes even further, filing suit in Oklahoma courts to force the release of the audit.
“If you take a look at Scott Pruitt’s record, you see a general disregard for transparency,” said Daniel Stevens, the group’s executive director. “I don’t think it’s outside our bounds to say that Pruitt is trying to hide evidence of criminal wrongdoing.”
Pruitt, in an interview, dismissed the idea that he was covering anything up, saying his former office’s grand jury unit reviewed the audit and determined that no charges were warranted. He said he declined to make it public because he didn’t want innocent people to be besmirched, even though the auditor rejected that reasoning and maintained it should be a public document. “It was important to protect the individuals’ reputation that were in that investigation,” Pruitt said.
Nonetheless, the mess at Tar Creek continues to follow Pruitt in other ways. As EPA administrator, he has assumed full responsibility for the still-faltering cleanup. And eyebrows were raised in Oklahoma this past January when, as Pruitt was awaiting confirmation for his EPA post, a White House spokesperson told Bloomberg News that the handling of Tar Creek was emblematic of Pruitt’s philosophy: “national standards, neighborhood solutions.”
Pruitt, in an interview, said he knew nothing about the Bloomberg article, saying only that he endorses the EPA’s current work at Tar Creek and the principle of combining federal resources and state and local leadership, rather than the buyout that occurred before his time as EPA administrator, while he was Oklahoma’s attorney general.
“I think as far as a model going forward outside of the buyout, what we’re trying to do is have a renewed focus on what I think are some of the most beneficial things we can do for citizens across the country, and that’s to address some of these legacy sites that have substantial environmental challenges that allow them to once again enjoy the communities in their backyard,” he said.
But many residents of the Tar Creek area, who gave up their homes in a buyout they considered both coercive and corrupt, continue to blame Pruitt for the fact that no one was prosecuted. They described a program so rife with good-old-boy corruption that certain individuals received outsize payoffs while some homeowners got so little they couldn’t relocate anywhere nearby; meanwhile, they said, the people hired to demolish the homes received inflated contracts through a flawed process.
“We were lied to and deceived from Day One,” said Gloria Workman, who said her son has learning disabilities from growing up in the polluted zone of Tar Creek, which had lead-poisoning levels in children that were three times higher than those registered in Flint, Michigan, during the peak of its recent water crisis. “Not only were we losing our homes, we were raped in the process.”
“It was a nightmare,” said Mary Thompson, who was still awaiting a resolution from the trust when an EF4 tornado ripped through Tar Creek in 2008, throwing bodies and trailers through the sky, killing six people and destroying more than 100 homes. Without homes, many people took lower-than-expected buyout offers—however insufficient they were perceived to be—because they had nothing left, she said.
“They preyed on us after the tornado,” said Thompson, whose home was leveled.
Nonetheless, Inhofe, in a 2015 news release touting the completion of the buyout, cast it as a success because it did not lead to an expanded federal role.
“This is an example of a government program created for a specific purpose and then dissolves after the job is completed,” Inhofe proclaimed.
Now, he continues to defend it but sounds less celebratory. “The first thing to know about the Superfund site at Tar Creek is that it’s what’s called a ‘mega-site’ and that it is an exceptional circumstance in every way. You can’t compare it to any other Superfund site in the country,” Inhofe said in a statement to POLITICO. “The voluntary relocation assistance to get people out of harm’s way was right for the situation at Tar Creek, but may not be for every other Superfund—that is why state and local partnership is critical.”
To many former residents, who still want the investigative report by the state auditor to see the light of day, even these modest and conditional endorsements feel like slaps in the face.
“People hate the government out here, and it’s because of things like this,” said Aletha Redden, a lifelong resident of the area who has a Donald Trump bumper sticker on her pickup truck. “I want Scott Pruitt to know: This is not the model.”
View the post here.