Foe now will help cleanup
In an about-face, the lawyer who once helped Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne fight a Superfund cleanup for the Coeur d’Alene Basin will now sit on the commission overseeing the $359 million, 30-year cleanup of mine wastes from Mullan to Spokane.
L. Michael Bogert, appointed regional U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator by the Bush administration last year, was recently cleared to sit on the commission after a federal ethics review.
“I am looking forward to working closely with other commission members on the critically important issues affecting the health and welfare of so many people in the Basin,” Bogert said Wednesday.
Before joining the EPA last August, Bogert was the private legal counsel to Kempthorne in Boise. He was also Kempthorne’s staff general counsel from 1999 to 2004. When he became EPA’s regional administrator, he said he would recuse himself from all matters involving the EPA’s activities in the basin to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.
But EPA’s Office of General Counsel recently decided it would be in the best interest of the agency to allow Bogert to serve as the federal representative on the Coeur d’Alene Basin Environmental Improvement Commission, a coordinating body created by the Idaho Legislature in 2001. His predecessor, John Iani, a former Alaska fishing company executive, also served on the commission.
A leading Spokane environmentalist decried the green light from EPA headquarters allowing Bogert to serve on the basin commission.
“It raises issues of integrity in government. Bogert was the architect of Idaho’s opposition to the Coeur d’Alene Basin cleanup. That will cast a dark cloud over his involvement,” said Dr. John Osborn, of the Sierra Club’s Upper Columbia chapter.
While the EPA still has final legal authority over the big Superfund cleanup, the commission approves one- and five-year project work plans and serves as a forum to share information on the $359 million project.
Jay Manning, director of the Washington state Department of Ecology, was appointed in November to Washington’s lone seat on the commission by Gov. Christine Gregoire.
Robie Russell, the last Idahoan to serve as EPA’s regional administrator in the Pacific Northwest, was appointed in 1986 and proved to be highly controversial. The Moscow, Idaho, native was mired in ethical violations over the Silver Valley mine cleanup; a 1990 EPA Inspector General’s report said he worked diligently to prevent EPA officials from proceeding with the Superfund cleanup.