West Virginia's two U.S. senators are joining in the bipartisan praise for a major rewrite of the nation's chemical safety law that some critics are saying still doesn't go nearly far enough to fix a decades-old system that all sides agree is broken.
The Senate approved the long-awaited bill - the first significant changes in the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, in 40 years - on a voice vote Tuesday, sending it to President Obama for his expected signature.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., issued a statement calling the bill "much-needed legislation to modernize our severely outdated chemical regulatory system."
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said the legislation "will protect our families and provide regulatory certainty to our businesses and manufacturers."
The House of Representatives had approved the measure earlier on a 403-12 vote, with all three of West Virginia's Republican representatives voting in favor of it.
The White House has said that the administration strongly supports the bill as "a historic advancement for both chemical safety and environmental law."
Supporters tout the bill as finally giving regulators the authority to ban dangerous chemicals and setting up a firm schedule for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to review the safety of chemicals used in commerce. Opponents generally conceded that the bill is an improvement over current law, but say it doesn't require the EPA to move quickly enough to review a large enough number of potentially harmful substances and contains other potential loopholes.
"It is not perfect," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority-party member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, during Tuesday night's floor discussion of the bill.
Richard Denison, lead senior scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, which supported the bill, said the measure gives no one everything they wanted, but still represents a major strengthening of the law to protect public health from toxic chemicals.
Denison has noted, for example, that the bill establishes for the first time a mandate that the EPA review risks posed by chemicals already used in commerce, in contrast to the original law's grandfathering-in of chemicals then in use without any risk review. The law now also will replace the TSCA's cost-benefit balancing standard with one that ensures only human health and environmental impact are considered in assessing risk. Costs and other non-risk considerations can be examined in deciding how to regulate, not whether to regulate, under the new law, Denison said.
"At long last, [the] EPA will have stronger tools to protect Americans from toxic chemicals that impact the health of millions of Americans," Denison wrote last month, when a deal was struck that paved the way for final passage of the bill.
In its own statement, the American Chemical Society, an industry group, praised the final bill, saying it "represents years of careful negotiation" among many parties.
The long-stalled drive to reform the TSCA gained some momentum after the January 2014 Elk River chemical spill, which contaminated drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents in Charleston and surrounding Kanawha Valley communities. Advocates for improvements in chemical regulations seized on the lack of easily available data on human health effects of the chemicals involved and noted that some information about the materials that spilled had been designated as confidential as a trade secret.
Manchin and Capito mentioned the spill at Freedom Industries in their statements about the legislation.
Manchin said, "After the 2014 Elk River chemical spill, I vowed to do everything in my power to ensure a similar accident would never occur again."
Capito said, "Incidents like the Freedom Industries spill in Charleston demonstrate the need to ensure that the chemicals we use in our everyday lives are properly regulated."
The final legislation does include - in one nod to the Elk River spill - a requirement that the EPA, when choosing which chemicals to closely scrutinize, give preference to chemicals stored near significant sources of public drinking water. The Freedom spill occurred just 1.5 miles upstream from West Virginia American Water's regional drinking water intake in Charleston.
But Andy Igrejas, director of the group Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, said the final measure is not "aggressive or comprehensive enough" to be able to say it would prevent another incident like the water crisis that followed the Freedom Industries spill.
"The minimum number of chemicals [the] EPA is required to review is so small and the pace is so slow that I wouldn't predict the new program will intercept chemicals that pose and Elk River-type scenario in a timely fashion," Igrejas said Wednesday.
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702 or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.