PEP, April 2008: City council bill could halt air testing

A piece of legislation called for by President Bush’s Homeland Security Dept. and the city Police Dept. has set off a furor.

City Council Intro. 650 would require a license from the Police Dept. for anyone to have or use a detector that measures chemical, biological or radioactive agents. The original concept may have been to reduce false alarms and spare residents unwarranted anxiety about terrorist attacks, but safety and health experts view the actual consequences as potentially damaging.

If such a bill had been in effect in 2001, it could have been used to ban the independent monitoring that revealed dangerous levels of toxic airborne pollutants in lower Manhattan and showed that government agencies and officials such as federal environmental chief Christie Whitman and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani were lying.

Under this bill, the environmental experts who tested the air after 9/11 “would have been a bunch of criminals,” said Dave Newman, an industrial hygienist for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health.

“Chilling effect”
A broad coalition formed to stop the legislation wrote Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on March 13 saying that Intro. 650 would have “a chilling effect on citizens’ lawful and even commendable activity.” The coalition includes DC 37 and 44 environmental, labor, academic, public health, faith-based and civil liberties organizations.

The bill’s definition of biological, chemical and radioactivity detectors is so broad that it would cover all types of environmental sensors, as well as research and laboratory analyses by teachers, students, unions and environmental groups, says the coalition.

Intro. 650 could “hinder the flow of information regarding serious airborne pollutants and other environmental health conditions” faced by city residents and workers more than it would aid in the response to “a potential future terrorist attack.”

The coalition charged that Intro. 650 “vests in the police commissioner broad, unilateral authority” to regulate complex scientific matters. The group has been convincing original sponsors to reject the bill, but proposes to work with the City Council to develop narrower “alternative legislation to serve the legitimate purposes asserted by the NYPD.”