LANSING, MI — Environmental activists are joining forces to advance a community-centric policy agenda around PFAS contamination in Michigan and beyond.
On Thursday, July 15, activists announced the creation of the Great Lakes PFAS Action Network (GLPAN) to advocate for environmental response and cleanup policies that put community concerns at the forefront of state and federal actions.
“Citizens have much more power and influence than we give ourselves credit for,” said Sandy Wynn-Stelt, a widow who lives across from the House Street dump in Belmont, where the global footwear manufacturer Wolverine World Wide polluted the groundwater with toxic chemicals.
“We have the ability to change policy,” said Wynn-Stelt, who has become a leading voice on PFAS issues in Michigan following the death of her husband, Joel, and the discovery of severe contamination next door in 2017. “I learned that by standing together with other community members and being smart and being persistent, we truly can get some policy changed.”
Nonetheless, she and others say that affected residents too often must fight for a seat at the table with regulators and polluters when public health response and remediation decisions are being made.
Activists want the new network to be a resource for communities around Michigan and the wider Great Lakes region that may lack advanced legal and technical knowledge necessary to safeguard their interests when the pollutants are found. There’s strength in numbers, they said.
“It’s easy to take a look at a small community and say, ‘Oh, that’s too bad they have a problem there,’ but when it’s Oscoda and Belmont and Ann Arbor and Detroit and Dearborn and Flint, it’s much, much more difficult for folks to brush us aside,” said Tony Spaniola, an attorney who owns a home near the former Wurtsmth Air Force base in Oscoda.
Spaniola, who advocates for tougher PFAS regulations and response at a local level in Oscoda, as well as nationally through the National PFAS Contamination Coalition (NPCC), said citizen advocacy has borne fruit in Michigan.
He cited a citizen advisory work group (CAWG) created under the state’s official PFAS Action Response Team (MPART), a special unit in the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) created in 2017 and re-formed in 2019 to focus solely on PFAS investigations and response.
Earlier this week, with a unanimous vote, that advisory group formally recommended the state expedite notifications for residents near a potential PFAS investigation site. The potential EGLE policy update follows backlash in Traverse City after a neighborhood using private wells near the Cherry Capitol Airport didn’t learn about suspected contamination last year until eight months after investigations began.
The citizen advisory group includes members of a Rockford citizen group that worked quietly for years to build evidence of contamination at Wolverine’s tannery and old waste dumps. Their work helped expose the state’s most severe example of PFAS contamination and led to the creation of MPART.
The GLPAN formation isn’t the first time Michigan PFAS activists have come together to speak with a common voice. Affected residents from Belmont, Oscoda, Flint, Detroit and Grayling appeared together in September 2019 ahead of a community meeting about pollution at Wurtsmith.
Spaniola said it wasn’t long ago that he and fellow Oscoda activist Cathy Wusterbarth “couldn’t get anybody to talk to or even listen to us.”
“That’s changed pretty dramatically, and we think that by organizing formally this way that we will have a much broader platform to attract even more folks, and to make an even bigger impact,” Spaniola said.
Spaniola said the group’s policy objectives are still being defined but they plan to advocate for the regulation of PFAS as a class of chemicals similar to historical pollutants PCBs or dioxins rather than individually, as chemical manufacturers are advocating with EPA and Congress.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took a step in that direction this month by including the entire class of chemicals on a draft list of contaminants that are not subject to national regulations, but which are known to occur in public water systems. The agency separated out the individual compounds PFOS and PFOA, which it already begun developing national standards for under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) earlier this year.
There are thousands of variations of PFAS chemistry and “it’s just backwards to take them one-by-one,” Spaniola said. The position aligns with that of national environmental groups pushing PFAS regulation as a class.
Other GLPAN policy objectives include the removal of all but the most essential uses of PFAS from commerce and helping to educate physicians and others in the medical field about PFAS so those who have been exposed can get better health guidance, he said.
“We need the state and federal agencies to take our health concerns seriously and get answers for those,” said Wynn-Stelt, who survived a brush with thyroid cancer last year after getting a second opinion on a lump in her lymph nodes. Her blood has sky high PFAS levels after drinking well water that was extremely contaminated by the next door Wolverine dump.
“I think we need clear communication with government agencies and people that are responsible for working with us so that we know what to expect, and they know what we want,” she said. “Most importantly, I think we need very clear accountability for polluters so that this burden does not fall on us as taxpayers, but falls on the people that have profited from making this.”
“I’m really excited to see where this leads us in the future.”
Related stories:
Rogue River becomes focus of Wolverine cleanup
EGLE gives ‘phyto’ cleanup plan big thumbs down
Got a PFAS story? Michigan professor wants to hear it
Michigan air bases on “Filthy 50” Senate PFAS priority list
It’s literally raining PFAS around the Great Lakes
Air Force refuses to own PFAS around Oscoda
Oscoda community wrestles a ‘forever’ problem
Michigan testing blood of firefighters for PFAS
3M sues Michigan to invalidate PFAS rules
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