Longmont City Council agrees to send letter to Attorney General to investigate air quality permits

City council voted 6-1 Tuesday night to ask Attorney General Phil Weiser to investigate allegations that managers in the Colorado Air Pollution Control Division, or APCD, ordered their staff to falsify data and approve permits “at all costs.”

The request comes in the form of a letter from the city council to Weiser that outlines allegations made by three state employee whistleblowers. The allegations were filed with the EPA by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and reported by the Colorado Sun.

Mayor Brian Bagley was the dissenting vote Tuesday night. Bagley told the council he favors an investigation by Weiser but that the city council should concentrate on issues inside Longmont.

The letter states the city of Longmont has at “public expense” engaged eminent atmospheric scientist, Detlev Helmig, to provide air quality monitoring in and around the city. “We are committed to advocating for a healthy environment,” the letter states.

“We are therefore particularly distressed by the alleged behaviors of some in leadership at the APCD and the CDPHE (Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment) that, if true, represent a profound betrayal of the state’s responsibility to protect the health and well-being of its citizens and may constitute unlawful conduct,” the letter states.

The letter includes phrases from the Colorado Sun showing portions of the whistleblower complaint:

• The alleged policy change by the Air Pollution Control Division leaders is “the latest and most concrete instance of a pattern of unlawful conduct which is directly responsible for Colorado’s precipitous decline in air quality in the last decade.”
• The complaint includes a sample list of “unlawfully issued permits to Colorado industrial operations that range from asphalt plants, to coal mines, to oil drilling pads, to meatpackers, to a gold mine”
• ...one of the state modeling specialists was ‘ordered to falsify data’ to avoid the model predicting a violation.”
• The complaint describes in detail a leadership culture of “‘approving permits at all costs.”
• Public scrutiny is the only criteria that CDPHE is concerned about when enforcing, or abstaining from, the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, and not legal obligations or concern for public health and the environment,”   

The complaint states such patterns may have been practiced for the previous decade, according to the council letter.

The letter also asks that, among other things, to pause all permits that violated modeling requirements until an investigation is completed and to dispatch full-time monitoring equipment to the sites which were allegedly approved without proper modeling.