Today’s edition of the State Register lists two meetings that don’t comply with the public notice requirements of West Virginia’s open meetings law.

One meeting is of the Corridor G Regional Development Authority. The meeting was held Wednesday, but the notice didn’t hit the Register until today. The authority is a previous offender, as Sustained Outrage pointed out here and here.

The other violator today was the Legal Committee of the West Virginia Investment Management Board.

As we’ve reminded folks before, the West Virginia Open Governmental Proceedings Act requires agencies to send meeting notices to the Secretary of State in time for notices to appear in the State Register five days prior to a scheduled meeting. Every week, we list the agencies that didn’t comply, thanks to the Secretary of State’s office, which kindly marks those agencies with an asterisk in the list of meetings published each Friday in the Register.

It screams out for public disclosure.

 Judge Arthur Recht

In late September, we covered the start of a major Supreme Court appeal of a key issue involving the West Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

The Shepherdstown Observer newspaper wants to know who signed a petition to get a new local zoning ordinance on the ballot for a Nov. 9 special election. County Clerk Jennifer Maghan refused to provide the requested documents, and Circuit Judge David H. Sanders upheld that decision.

Lawyers for the Observer appealed. The state Supreme Court has not yet decided if it will hear the case.

But now, a circuit judge in another West Virginia county has ruled the opposite way, mandating disclosure of similar documents in a similar case.

According to the Wheeling Intelligencer,  Ohio Circuit Judge Arthur Recht ordered the signatures of those seeking an election on Wheeling’s two-officer per cruiser ordinance released to the local Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.

City lawyers argued that Recht should follow the decision in Jefferson County, but he didn’t seem to interested in doing so:

Any other circuit court decision is not binding. … There are 65 circuit judges in West Virginia. I don’t care what the other 64 are doing - and so that there is no misunderstanding, I’m sure that they don’t care what I’m doing.

On the heels on yesterday’s major new study about the possible connection between the toxic chemical C8 and increased cholesterol levels, this morning I learned of two more studies that link C8 to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and to hormone disruption in kids.

I don’t believe either study has been “published” yet in a peer-reviewed journal, but both papers were presented in late August at the annual meeting of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology in Dublin, Ireland.

This paper, by Kate Hoffman and others at the Boston University School of Public Health,  found an increased risk of ADHD in kids who had more PFOA in their blood. This study used blood sample data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which collects the data from the general U.S. population.

And this one, by Susan M. Pinney of the University of Cincinnati and others, found a relationship between PFOA and breast growth in girls and young women, an indication that PFOA “acts as an endocrine disruptor.”  This study used data from the NIH Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Centers.

On Friday, I wrote a story for Saturday’s Gazette-Mail about the latest C8 Science Panel report, which found high levels of PFOA and a similar chemical, PFOS, to be associated with higher cholesterol among children in communities surrounding the DuPont Co. Washington Works plant near Parkersburg (see photo above).

The Science Panel has finally added its report to its Web site, after filing a copy of it with the Wood Circuit Court Friday. I’m not aware of any efforts by the Science Panel to call attention to this finding by contacting the press, let alone telling area residents about it through a public meeting or a press conference.

But today, some even bigger news was published on the C8/PFOA front: A major new study is out that finds higher cholesterol levels are associated with concentrations of PFOA in human blood right at the average levels in the U.S. general population.

This new paper, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives,  was authored by Jessica Nelson, Elizabeth Hatch and Thomas Webster of the Boston University School of Public Health.

The findings are based on blood samples from about 2,100 people, from data collected as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES, which is done by the CDC. It found an association between high cholesterol (both total and non-HDL, or “bad cholesterol”) and concentrations in the blood of PFOA (or C8), PFOS and another similar chemical, PFNA.

Previous studies of highly exposed workers, and of highly exposed non-workers like those who live near the DuPont Parkersburg plant, have  found associations with high cholesterol. But the new study examined blood samples from the general U.S. population, with a leve of these chemicals — 3.8 parts per billion for C8 — similar to average Americans who don’t work in a chemical plant or live near one that used these chemicals.

Of course, these studies don’t prove that exposure to these chemicals caused  increased cholesterol levels. They simply show that folks with higher levels of the chemicals were more likely to have increased cholesterol than folks with lower levels of the chemicals. One problem is that the studies don’t show which came first — the chemical exposure or the increased cholesterol.

Still, the authors of the latest paper concluded:

… PFCs may be exerting an effect on cholesterol metabolism at environmentally relevant exposures … While this study does not demonstrate a causal association between PFC exposure and serum cholesterol levels, it provides clues about where to focus future epidemiologic and toxicologic research.

Despite its limitations, this study contributes to the literature suggesting that PFC exposure may disrupt cholesterol metabolism or homeostasis in humans.

There were two meetings in today’s edition of The State Register that didn’t meet the public notice requirements of West Virginia’s open meetings law.

One was a meeting today of the public policy committee of the Women’s Commission and the other was a meeting yesterday of the Fayette County Board of Health.

As we’ve reminded folks before, the West Virginia Open Governmental Proceedings Act requires agencies to send meeting notices to the Secretary of State in time for notices to appear in the State Register five days prior to a scheduled meeting. Every week, we list the agencies that didn’t comply, thanks to the Secretary of State’s office, which kindly marks those agencies with an asterisk in the list of meetings published each Friday in the Register.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released information about the early results of air quality monitoring near some West Virginia schools. The monitoring is being done as part of a broader EPA project, prompted at least in part by a USA Today series on air quality near the nation’s schools.

Here’s what EPA had to say about the West Virginia part of the program:

PHILADELPHIA (October 29, 2009) – Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released initial data from air toxics monitoring outside Follansbee Middle School, Cabell County Career Technology Center, and Neale Elementary School.

EPA selected these three schools in Follansbee, Huntington, and Vienna, W.Va. respectively, as a part of the 63 schools in 22 states nationwide for air toxics monitoring.

EPA and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection have been using air toxics monitors outside the school to collect data since August. At these three West Virginia schools, EPA is looking at metals in PM10. Additionally, at Follansbee Middle School, the agencies will also look at polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds. These are the pollutants most likely to be of concern at the schools, based on the best available information about emissions and sources of pollution in these areas.

The initial data at these schools show the monitored air toxics are below levels of short-term health concerns. EPA scientists caution against drawing conclusions at the point as the study is designed to determine whether long-term, not short-term, exposure poses health risks to school children and staff.

[Read more →]

For court watchers, the big news in West Virginia this week was the unanimous confirmation of Judge Irene C. Berger (right) by the U.S. Senate. Tuesday’s 97-0 vote makes Berger the first black judge on the federal bench in West Virginia history.

But Berger’s relatively smooth passage notwithstanding, the confirmation process is apparently becoming more contentious. After Michael A. Fletcher of the Washington Post noted that the Obama administration has submitted fewer names during its first nine months in office than its predecessor, several commentators have suggested that part of the reason so few judges have been confirmed is that Senate Republicans have taken obstructionism to a new level.

In a widely-read piece published Monday, Slate’s Doug Kendall said that Senate Republicans have slowed the confirmation process to a crawl by delaying up-and-down votes even for candidates unlikely to raise objections.

The emerging Republican strategy is to hold these uncontroversial nominees hostage as pawns in the larger war over President Obama’s agenda and the direction of the federal judiciary. The Senate operates according to a set of arcane rules that allows a minority party to bring the institution to a halt if it chooses to do so. Most bills and nominations pass through the Senate with no debate and only a voice vote on the Senate floor. But this requires every senator to play along. By stonewalling on every nominee so far, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is requiring his counterpart, Sen. Reid, to negotiate, or devote precious floor time, for every judicial confirmation.

An Oct. 23 study by Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, concluded that the relatively few Obama nominees are receiving speedy hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but little more.

It is too soon to say whether these early developments presage an administration with a less energetic policy on judicial nominations than its predecessor; greater difficulty in identifying qualified candidates, especially non-judges; or a Senate that will not confirm large numbers of nominees because of unchallenged minority delaying tactics—or some combination of all three. 

Part of the issue, Wheeler wrote, may be that Obama is in a position to reshape the federal judiciary in ways that President George W. Bush never could. According to Wheeler, 41 percent of Obama’s nominees to federal District and Appeals courts would replace a Republican nominee, compared to 22 percent of Bush’s judges who replaced Democratic nominees.

[Read more →]

Oops. Is Thursday gone already? In that case, here’s this week’s overdue glance at what we’re reading:

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had identified 15 states to receive $250,000, the better for states to compete for “Race to the Top” education stimulus money. After other states complained, the foundation has made funds available to all states, the New York Times reports.

One anti-flu tactic is advising people to stay home when they are sick. But that amounts to a day without pay for 34 percent of U.S. workers, or 72 percent of part-time workers who have no paid sick leave, reports the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times.

As job losses and foreclosures stress families, more teens are running away from their families, and often, no one is looking for them, the New York Times found.

AP photo by Tom Hindman, Charleston Daily Mail. 

Lawmakers in Washington are headed toward funding a major scientific study of Bayer CropScience’s use of the deadly chemical methyl isocyanate a the company’s plant in Institute, W.Va.

Funding for the study — $600,000 of it — is tucked into a nearly 400-page conference committee report on next year’s budget bill for Interior, Environment and Related Agencies. The report is here, and the MIC study language starts at the bottom of page 132 (of the bill, not the .pdf file).

The conference report provides that:

… $600,000 shall be for a study by the National Academy of Sciences to examine the use and storage of methyl isocyanate including the feasibility of implementing alternative chemicals or processes and an examination of the cost of alternatives at the Bayer CropScience facility in Institute, West Virginia.

That’s right — the National Academy of Sciences. Previously, budget legislation called for this study to be conducted by the federal Chemical Safety Board. Sens. Robert C. Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, both D-W.Va., have been pushing various pieces of legislation and budget language aimed at Bayer and MIC, following the August 2008 explosion and fire that killed two workers at the Institute plant.

Just before the one-year anniversary of that deadly accident, Bayer announced it was cutting its huge MIC stockpile — the only such  MIC inventory in the world — by 80 percent.

Bayer took action after political pressure on the company increased greatly — including the outspoken criticism by Rockefeller and Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper — following a congressional report and a preliminary Chemical Safety Board study that warned the August explosion could have ended up worse than Bhopal.

Local political leaders and activists praised Bayer’s decision, but they also pointed out that the stockpile reduction still leaves the Institute plant storing up to 50,000 pounds of MIC daily — more than enough, critics said, to cause a Bhopal-sized disaster here in the Kanawha Valley.

In Congress, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman has pushed for the CSB to continue its investigation of the Bayer situation, including examining “the feasibility of Bayer eliminating all on-site storage of this dangerous chemical.“

Today’s issue of The State Register contains just one meeting that violated the public notice requirements of West Virginia’s open meetings law.

That was a meeting held today by the board at City Hospital Inc. Interestingly, the notice doesn’t even say what city City Hospital is in … Perhaps it’s the one in Martinsburg. The public has no way of knowing.

As we’ve reminded folks before, the West Virginia Open Governmental Proceedings Act requires agencies to send meeting notices to the Secretary of State in time for notices to appear in the State Register five days prior to a scheduled meeting. Every week, we list the agencies that didn’t comply, thanks to the Secretary of State’s office, which kindly marks those agencies with an asterisk in the list of meetings published each Friday in the Register.