EPA exec lends environmental hand to Israel

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer
12.29.05

When Shimon Peres called on the Bush administration for help in cleaning up a toxic waste site in the Negev Desert, Alan Steinberg was happy to be of assistance.

Peres, then a deputy prime minister under Ariel Sharon, made a formal request for technical assistance to clean up Ramat Hovav, an industrial zone near Beersheva and the location of 17 chemical and pharmaceutical companies.

Steinberg, a West Orange resident and longtime Republican activist, is administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 2, a territory that encompasses New York, New Jersey, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.

Steinberg dispatched three experts from Dec. 5 to Dec. 9 to help the Israelis cope with manufacturing processes that were causing what he called “fairly serious” damage to the area’s environment.

“It wasn’t a case of things being dumped illegally,” said the EPA executive. “It was a case of knowing how to deal with these kinds of releases.”

With the Israeli government paying their expenses, Steinberg sent two of his staff members to the Negev. They were Jacqueline Rios, who deals with water pollution problems, and Harry Allen, an expert on hazardous waste. Joining them was Andrew Seligman, an expert on air quality from EPA’s Region 3 in Pennsylvania.

“Environmental issues are relatively new to Israeli society. They have not developed an extensive set of regulations,” said Steinberg, an Orthodox Jew who, as executive vice president of the New Jersey State Commerce Commission under Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, led trade missions to Israel. “Development and economic growth have totally transformed the country. It is one of the most rapidly modernizing societies in the world.

“But with that modernization come issues of how to maintain the environment,” he added, “and Israel is in the process of trying to comprehend these issues.”

Steinberg said it was not unusual for the EPA to provide help in abating toxic situations in other countries. “Environmental problems are international in scope,” said Steinberg. “By dealing with them in one area, you can affect the whole world. These individuals who went over there did not drop any of their duties to participate in this trip.”

But at least one environmental activist, Amy Goldsmith, state director of the NJ Environmental Federation, questioned the administration’s priorities and the EPA’s willingness to lend technical expertise to Israel while “there is a plethora of problems in the United States that should be addressed, and the EPA is not addressing them.”

“People are getting sick from poisons in our air and in our water and in the products we use every day,” she told NJ Jewish News, citing 13,000 contaminated sites in New Jersey, and 116 federally designated Superfund hazardous waste sites in the state.

Steinberg denied Goldsmith’s charge that the administration was neglecting the Superfund. “The question is funding it,” he said. “Our belief is that the polluters should pay, and we vigorously pursue potentially responsible parties. The idea that the Bush administration has under-funded Superfund is not true.”

And even Goldsmith agreed in the end that the EPA should lend support to other nations with serious pollution problems.

“The United States is part of the global world,” she said. If we have expertise “that can help another country, it is in our best interest to help in those endeavors when that expertise might not exist elsewhere.”

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