EPA Official to Examine Proposed Rule on Laundries

The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general said yesterday that she will investigate the writing of an EPA rule for industrial laundries that environmental and labor groups have criticized as being crafted to help a company run by a major fundraiser for President Bush.

Cintas Corp., whose chairman, Richard T. Farmer of Cincinnati, is a top Republican donor who raised more than $250,000 for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, would be a major beneficiary of the rule. Cintas rents towels as part of its business renting and laundering uniforms and providing supplies to factories, auto-repair garages and machine shops.

For more than two decades the EPA has debated how to regulate the cloth towels used to wipe up chemicals in printing plants, factories and industrial shops. During the Clinton administration the EPA proposed that factories and laundries wring out the towels before laundering to prevent solvents from evaporating as pollution or ending up in groundwater after laundering.

The laundry industry opposed the proposal as overregulation. In November 2003 the EPA changed its position, adopting a more lenient proposal. The rule is set to take effect in 2006.

Inspector General Nikki Tinsley's office yesterday told lawmakers who had requested the review that the investigation will take about seven months. The Washington Post reported in May that the EPA had provided industrial-laundry lobbyists with an advance copy of a portion of the proposed rule, which the lobbyists edited and the agency then adopted. The rule's opponents -- hazardous-waste landfill operators and manufacturers of paperlike towels in addition to environmental groups and labor -- said they were not given that opportunity.

In a letter to lawmakers in September, acting Assistant EPA Administrator Thomas P. Dunne defended the rulemaking as fair and open. "EPA did not provide preferential treatment nor inappropriate access to any stakeholders during the rulemaking process," he said.

The inspector general will investigate whether there was undue favoritism bestowed on industrial-laundry lobbyists and lack of disclosure under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), whose aides spoke with IG officials yesterday. That law requires federal agencies to "provide equal and open public access to the advice and recommendations EPA receives or solicits from outside parties," according to an 11-year-old EPA policy memo.

Staff members for the inspector general said a six-month preliminary inquiry had "found that some of the EPA's explanations were not satisfactory," DeLauro said. Requesting the investigation along with DeLauro were Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Cintas Chairman Farmer, one of the richest men in America, gave $100,000 to Progress for America, an independent 527 group that ran negative ads aimed at Democratic nominee John F. Kerry. Farmer was the largest donor to Republican causes since 1990 among the members of the Bush Pioneer and Ranger fundraising program. Farmer has denied receiving special treatment in exchange for his fundraising.