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Shuttering of agency libraries reflects White House’s suppression of science, some contend.

By DAVID GOLDSTEIN

The Kansas City Star

WASHINGTON | Shuttering the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency library in Kansas City, Kan., this fall represents more erosion of the agency’s effectiveness, Bush administration critics contend.

The EPA says no information will be lost, which some question. Others worry that the new reliance on the Internet will actually reduce public access to materials on subjects from acid rain to wetlands.

The library closings, which also occurred in Dallas and Chicago, give ammunition to environmentalists, scientists, open records supporters and those in Congress who believe the Bush administration is weakening the EPA.

An internal agency memo last summer spelled out plans to close labs, cut senior-level scientists and reduce environmental oversight.

Steve Kinser, a Superfund project engineer in Kansas City, Kan., and president of the local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the EPA’s professional employees, said the developments have made him look forward to his retirement next year even more.

"Our ability to do our job is being tested at every turn," he said. "I don’t know if I can say anything more plain than that."

In a letter Thursday to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, four House Democrats who will likely play influential roles next year on EPA issues wrote: "It now appears that EPA officials are dismantling what is likely one of our country’s most comprehensive and accessible collections of environmental materials."

The authors were the ranking Democrats on four House committees that oversee EPA issues: Bart Gordon of Tennessee, Science; John Dingell of Michigan, Energy; James Oberstar of Minnesota, Transportation; and Henry Waxman of California, Government Reform.

EPA officials insist that public access has not been compromised. In an e-mail, Linda Travers, acting assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Information, said material from the closed libraries will be available on the agency’s Web site at www.epa.gov in January and is accessible now through interlibrary loans.

"Nothing has been lost," said spokeswoman Jessica Emond.

Travers said that within two years, EPA-produced documents from all 21 libraries in the agency’s network that can be digitized will be accessible through the Internet.

Trying to save money by replacing printed resources with digitized versions on the Internet could make information less — not more — accessible, said Francesca Grifo, a botanist and director of scientific integrity at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"Nobody is against modernization, but we don’t see the digitization," she said. "We just see the libraries closing. We just see that public access has been cut off."

Still open, though some are operating with reduced hours, are EPA libraries in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver, San Francisco and Seattle. EPA spokeswoman Suzanne Ackerman said she knew of no current plans to close any of them.

The EPA, however, has closed its headquarters library in the nation’s capital, as well as a specialized library on chemicals. It shut down each with little or no public notice.

"They’re really acting like their hair’s on fire," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "They’re quickly closing the collections, boxing them and shipping them to repositories."

Among the holdings are hard-to-find articles and publications usually unavailable on the Internet.

Martha Keating, a former EPA air quality expert and now a researcher at Duke University, said the closings and the boxing-up of library contents for storage reminded her of the ending in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

"It’s like that last scene where the forklift is putting the boxed-up ark in a federal warehouse," she said. "That’s what I envision. It’s something that’s never to be seen again."

Unions representing about 10,000 EPA scientists, engineers and others have complained about the plan to Congress. Several lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate.

Critics question why libraries would be closed to save $2 million when the agency’s own study in 2004 found that they actually saved it more than $7.5 million annually in staff time.

Trained librarians guide EPA scientists, as well as the homeowner concerned about the construction project next door, through a trove of reports, books, scientific journals, maps and microfilm.

But staff use of the libraries has dropped dramatically because of the Internet, Travers said.

The agency is not digitizing everything from the closed libraries, however. Emond said that only outdated documents would be discarded.

"We don’t know which items are being tossed and which items are being saved," said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association. "They have 35,000 to 50,000 unique documents available only in EPA libraries. If that information is not saved, it’s gone forever."

Bill Hirzy, an EPA chemist, said the chemical library was told to "just literally throw in the Dumpster" a valuable collection of journals. "Just throw them out," he said. "We managed to put a halt to that. It’s that kind of craziness that’s going on down there."

Watchdogs claimed a victory last week when the administration backed off a plan to relax industry requirements to report any releases of toxic chemicals.

"It’s just consistent with the things we’re seeing across the board, suppressing and politicizing science in general," Grifo said. "This is not an isolated incident. This is part of a pattern."