Contact
Nora Naughton, nora.naughton@sierraclub.org
Detroit, Mich. – Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its intent to remove Muskegon County, Berrien County, and the Detroit Area from the list of areas in nonattainment for ozone. This news follows the courts ruling that the EPA improperly designated Detroit from ozone nonattainment to attainment, a move that allowed corporate polluters to skirt the rules and weakened protections for residents. Below you will find responses from Sierra Club leaders condemning this latest announcement from the EPA.
Elayne Coleman, Sierra Club Michigan Chapter Director
“Families across Michigan deserve to know that our federal and state agencies will uphold the law and act in the best interest of the people they serve. The health and safety of Michiganders should always come before corporate interests, and the EPA has a responsibility to hold polluters accountable to its own rules.”
Bryan Smigielski, Sierra Club Organizer
“The EPA is touting faster permits for polluters in the asthma capital of America. A federal court already blocked the last attempt to declare Detroit's air clean because Michigan hadn't adopted the pollution controls the Clean Air Act requires — and neither the state nor the EPA has done that work since. Now the EPA wants to replace those requirements with a promise that air quality will get better on its own, even as it moves to cancel public hearings for any new pollution that industry promises will be minor. Clean Air Act requirements exist because promises like these fail.”
Elena Saxonhouse, Managing Attorney for the Sierra Club Environmental Law Program
“EPA is bending over backwards to protect industry from having to comply with stricter rules to prevent ozone pollution. In doing so, it has twisted itself in legal knots. This proposal defies the Clean Air Act and the court ruling Sierra Club won when EPA tried to unlawfully lift Detroit’s nonattainment designation the last time.”