Professor Joel Mintz reports on some good news:
earlier this month, EPA and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) signed a Memorandum of Agreement with respect to the EPA's library system. Under that agreement, all of the closed EPA libraries, including EPA's main headquarters library, its chemical library, and the libraries in EPA Regions 5, 6 and 7, will be reopened by September 30th of this year. Most of the materials that were in the closed libraries will be returned to those facilities, catalogued, and made available to the public and to EPA's staff. Moreover, the libraries will be regularly open to the public for sufficient periods of time that full public access to their contents will be assured.
Prof. Mintz undoubtedly deserves some of the credit, insofar as he helped organize letters by law professors protesting the closings. I previously blogged about the EPA library closings here and here.
The EPA libraries contain little or nothing of value. They don't contain EPA records. EPA records are contained in 'record centers', and those have always, and (by law) will continue to hold records of EPA actions.
At Kansas City, the library was unused, simply because it contained very little of value (it contained, oddly enough, books-some environmental, some software how-to books. i.e. Microsoft Word for Dummies, and so on. They also received several newspaper subscriptions. But not records). It was the size of a large office (literally. The Regional Administrator and his secretary, with his conference room thrown in, have more office space than the KC library). It was run by a contracting company with, I would guess, 4-6 employees.
EPA records are contained in the records center in the basement (for a certain period of time, depending on the record. After that regulated certain time has expired-typically years, the records are transferred to a warehouse offsite. Eventually, by law, they are destroyed). That records center is, very roughly, a 20 x 80 foot room. It is run by a contracting company of, I would guess, 15-25 employees. The records center in the basement was not impacted by the closure of the library, nor the reopening of the library. If anyone wants to research EPA findings, they would have to check the records center. If they want to research trends, they would have to check the records center. If a lawyer wants to prepare a lawsuit of some kind, he goes to the records center. If a FOIA request comes in, the EPA employees have to retrieve their work from...the records center. Not the library. Superfund Sites, Environmental Impact Statements, Inspection records, regional studies, grant management history, and on and on and on. Not the library. The records center.
So it sounds like a bunch of lawyers, who didn't understand the recordkeeping system at the EPA, got their panties in a knot when they heard the words 'library' and 'closing' in the same sentence. Jackbooted thugs and all that.
As a result of that misunderstanding, we get to pay several hundred thousand dollars (remember those 4-6 contract employees?) a year to maintain the newspaper subscriptions.
Sk
Sk
(present company excluded, of course)