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When a federal subpoena seeking thousands of documents on the state’s automobile emissions testing program landed in the offices of the Department of Environmental Protection over the summer, state officials started to scramble. And nothing could have made Kyla Bennett any happier.
“I was very, very pleased,” says Bennett, director of the New England chapter of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a private, Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization that acts as a clearinghouse for whistleblowers inside environmental agencies. “It’s the first step in getting to the bottom of this.”
The controversy–now the focus of a criminal probe by the US attorney’s office–centers on the failure of the state-approved emissions tests to accurately measure tailpipe pollutants as mandated under the federal Clean Air Act, and on charges that the state adjusted the test without notifying federal officials. And PEER has been in the thick of it.
Earlier this year, PEER obtained internal DEP documents and e-mail correspondence on the auto emissions program, which it shared with The Boston Globe, under a Freedom of Information Act request. The group knew exactly what to ask for, thanks to a DEP employee who contacted PEER. The whistleblowing organization also helped DEP employees connect with the state Inspector General’s office, which has issued two reports on flaws in the state emissions testing program and asked federal officials to investigate.
To Bennett, spilling the beans is part of an environmental bureaucrat’s public duty, but one that requires an act of bravery. “Some people think these whistleblowers are just whiners who are not getting their way,” Bennett says of dime-dropping public employees. “It takes an incredible amount of courage to come forward. Without those people on the inside, the citizens of the Commonwealth and the citizens of this country would be in severe trouble.”
An attorney who has a PhD in ecology, the 42-year-old Bennett got herself into trouble as a government employee. In 1994, Bennett was working in the Boston office of the federal Environmental Protection Agency when she was targeted for transfer, she says, because of questions she was raising about permits for a proposed cargo port on a pristine island off the Maine coast. Bennett says then-EPA regional administrator John DeVillars was eager to push her off the project, which had strong backing from Maine Sen. George Mitchell. She filed a complaint with the Department of Labor, and EPA officials quickly backed down. Bennett says she continued to clash with DeVillars over handling of wetlands cases, however, and finally left EPA in 1999.
DeVillars, now working in the private sector, says he recalls few details of the employment controversy, but he has no trouble remembering Bennett herself. “Zealous,” he says, is “the kindest word I’ve heard used to describe her.” He calls PEER “a fringe group bordering on the irrelevant.”
Eric Wingerter, national field director at PEER’s Washington office, has heard the charge before. “I think it’s in the agencies’ interests most of the time to label us extremist,” he says.
For her part, Bennett seems more than willing to play the skunk at the bureaucrats’ garden party. “I don’t enjoy being labeled a troublemaker, but I have come to accept it,” says Bennett. “It’s the business we’re in.”
Bennett has pursued that business with relish. Last year, PEER issued a report slamming the MBTA’s plans to extend commuter rail service to New Bedford and Fall River by routing trains through Hockomock Swamp in Easton, the largest freshwater wetland in the state. Calling the rail line an “ecological train wreck,” PEER charged that the T failed to carry out tests that would show potential damage to several rare or endangered species of animal life, and that state environmental officials bowed to pressure from South Coast officials by signing off on the transit agency’s environmental impact report.
Jon Carlisle, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Transportation and Construction, acknowledges that the project will have environmental impacts, but insists that the route is the best available option for extending rail service to an area that needs it. As to PEER’s tactics, Carlisle chooses his words carefully. “Bomb throwing can compel us as public officials to keep an eye on our activities,” Carlisle acknowledges, but adds that it can also “diminish [the] credibility” of those leveling the charges.
But Inspector General Gregory Sullivan says the bombs PEER has been throwing at the emissions program have been on target, and have given him valuable ammunition for his agency’s investigation. “PEER was very instrumental in helping us to get the cooperation of internal employees at DEP,” says Sullivan. Without the help of these insiders, he says, his office wouldn’t have been able to “even begin to breach the veil, because of the level of technical complication” in scrutinizing the program.
Bennett earns $50,000 a year to staff PEER’s one-woman New England office, almost $20,000 less than she earned at EPA. “Not everyone turns into an Erin Brockovich,” she says. “Not everyone becomes rich and famous and ends up on the cover of Newsweek and has a movie made about them.”
Indeed, relying on foundations and individual donors to support its national staff of 17, PEER scrambles for every dollar. One of its fundraising schemes: selling boxer shorts featuring the PEER logo on one leg, and undercover activist across the seat.
Do people really wear them? Bennett isn’t sure. But that’s the whole idea. “They can wear them to office and no one will know,” she says.
