Managing the Environmental Regulations and Safety
29
With regard to statutory provisions of liability and compliance, there
is a vast and bewildering array of paragraphs and sections of the
numerous acts. In discussing liability and compliance in the statutory
sense, it is essential to broaden these considerations to include inspection,
reports and enforcement. It is under all of these subject headings that
one must study the provisions of any particular enactment such as RCRA
and CERCLA. There are similarities between the separate provisions of
the various environmental statutes, but one needs to study each act to be
certain.
Environmental violations may result in reactions by more than one
governmental body under more than one provision of more than one
statute. Since the environmental laws, generally, are framed for
delegation to the states, there may be concurrent violations of both state
and federal law. Some states are more diligent even than the federal
government in enforcing environmental requirements. This means that
differences in enforcement practices from one state to another can be
substantial. It is important to study the enforcement attitudes and the
abilities of a state as well as the written laws on the state's books.
One must also recognize that the federal government is not a
monolithic structure. Though the enforcement scheme
for federal laws
is intended to be set by the EPA, that agency itself is made up of a
number of different offices in its own headquarters and ten regional
offices across the country. Attitudes and interpretation of policy may
differ substantially between offices and between regions. EPA has stated
that it encourages the use of persuasion, administrative action and other
alternatives before going to court for judicial action. The practice and
the announced policy may not always coincide.
Cases referred for trial in federal court by the EPA are actually
handled by the United States Department of Justice. This provides
another possibility for differences in interpretation and action. Program
offices within the EPA, legal offices in the EPA, the headquarters of the
Department of Justice, and the various United States Attorneys (who are
the local representatives of the Department of Justice) may all have
vastly different ideas of appropriate measures to force compliance. One
must be aware of all these potential variations.
Even beyond the environmental statutes, one must also be aware of
possible violations of such laws as those covering mail fraud. Liability
may be established simply by mailing a false report to EPA. Other
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