Moving Day Blues For EPA
After having a new building constructed for it 10 years ago, EPA’s Region 7 Headquarters is preparing to move out of the heart of Kansas City, Kansas to a nearby suburb, Lenexa . . . and a lot of people are very upset about it.
The move will take 600 EPA regional office employees out of 
a building that has done great things for Kansas City’s urban core and will move them to an abandoned Applebee’s headquarters in the suburb. I have had the dubious pleasure of being at the current headquarters many times and I always thought it was a great building and a great location.
The debate is devolving into a classic he-said, she-said argument. Each side is pointing at the other and it is all playing out in the newspapers and internet. No one really knows all the facts as to whether the landlord was demanding some outrageous sum or the General Service Administration (which negotiates these leases) was making unreasonable demands. Until all the facts are known, you just cannot condemn either side.
However, there was a statement made that I think is worth noting. Charlie Cook, a spokesman for G.S.A., reportedly said that the decision was purely a matter of economics:
To me, that sounds like the overriding consideration in making the siting decision was money and, if so, EPA has done itself a huge disservice. Most things that are good for the environment are more expensive than those that are not – it's always cheaper to skip installing the liner at a landfill; it is a huge cost savings to dump hazardous waste in a stream rather than take it to a treatment facility; and if a business wants to save money, avoiding the installation of air scrubbers would do the trick. But the idea is that a cleaner environment sometimes requires expenditures beyond what is convenient.
If it was someone else, say Microsoft or Ford or Aetna, would we be having this discussion? Probably not. But EPA is not a private company. EPA is in charge of the environment. Even if it can consider only the economics, it shouldn’t. There should be some sort of a cost-benefit analysis, not just a cost analysis.
As I said, it does not appear that all of the facts have been provided to us. If EPA has balanced all of the environmental factors as well as the economic ones and has decided that the move is warranted, then the agency should make its case. But if it has done that, we haven’t seen it.
I should add that this is not just a credibility issue. If EPA can use the defense that it costs too much to consider the environment, then businesses should be granted that same exemption. And if that argument catches on, EPA is not going to need any headquarters.
