The Guardian reports on the erosion of the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect the environment and regulate industry. “The impacts will include “more respiratory illness and heart disease” that shortens lives; “decreased water quality” for drinking water, fisheries and recreation; “reduced Superfund cleanups,”; and “devastating consequences” from unchecked climate change, the group said. But EPA’s problems started long before Trump was elected in 2016. Fifty years after its creation under the Nixon administration, the EPA has found itself outgunned by industry. The agency’s budget and staffing have withered over the past generation – while industry has tightened its grip on the political system and entrenched new sectors with minimal oversight. Amid a scientific revolution in understanding human and environmental responses to pollution, regulators have been unable to translate many of those findings into stronger safeguards. Those concerns are detailed by 76 current and former EPA staffers interviewed over the past several years, in research under peer review… Many staff interviewed in the research blamed the politicization of the environment. Over the past few decades, Republicans have become more aligned with polluting industries and opposed to regulation, calling it government interference in the free market…. “This agency is in the process of giving up on protecting people. It’s much more interested, at least the leadership is, in protecting the regulated community,” said Christopher Sellers, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental history at Stonybrook University.”
The City of Sacramento passed a public safety resolution this week that will expand funding for community strategies to promote safety and wellbeing. The Sacramento Bee reports that “prior to Tuesday, City Code had not explicitly defined “public safety”. Officials usually use a de facto definition related to police, fire, and emergency medical services. This generalization has led the city to approach public safety as an urgent response to a crisis — a crime, a fire, a shooting — versus preventative services to improve neighborhood safety and quality of life, advocates said. By broadening the definition of public safety in Sacramento, advocates say existing dollars for public safety can be more flexibly spent on community-centered and youth-oriented programming that address the policies, systems, and environmental risk factors that perpetuate violence against young people.”
The New York Times reports that the “outlook for the pandemic continues to worsen, and many areas of the United States are experiencing their worst weeks yet. The country reported a record of more than 500,000 new coronavirus cases in the past week. It’s not just a few areas driving the surge, as was the case early on. Half of U.S. counties saw new cases peak during the past month. Almost a third saw a record in the past week.”
PI’s Elva Yanez wrote about California’s Proposition 15 and how revenues could support vital public services. “The timing for Proposition 15 to be on the ballot couldn't be better. By requiring that corporations pay their fair share of taxes on commercial property, the proposition will generate an estimated $8 to 12 billion in funds per year. Forty percent of those funds will go directly to schools and the other 60 percent will go toward county-level services like nutrition assistance, rent relief, and public health contact-tracing programs, among others.”