- Target:
- U.S. House and Senate
- Region:
- United States of America
- Website:
- www.publictrustbetrayed.com
Recent environmental catastrophes, like the contaminated water supplies of Flint, Michigan and communities in upper state New York(1), offer clear and frightening evidence that public officials cannot always be trusted to inform the public of environmental hazards in a timely manner.
In such cases both government employees and elected officials have denied, resisted and delayed announcing - or even acknowledging - environmental test findings and other knowledge that clearly points to the public being at grave risk. Such failure to serve the public interest may go on for months, or even years; compounding the risk to the public's health and welfare.
Some of these officials are fired, resign or pressed to leave office, when their failure to act becomes general knowledge. But, clearly, the threat of losing face or suffering a career set-back is not strong enough to assure these persons honor even their most fundamental obligation to the people they are charged to serve. They need to be held truly accountable for their misdeeds and inaction.
(1) - (http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/03/01/drinking-water-crisis-ny)
We, the undersigned, call for legislation to be proposed and enacted that will make it a felony for both public employees and officials to fail to inform the public of environmental hazards in a timely and well-publicized manner.
As a guideline to drafting such legislation, the term "timely" refers to notice being issued within two weeks of problematic facts or findings becoming known, and "well-publicized" refers to publishing notice to affected citizens via all public-facing governmental media (newsletters, websites, etc.) and alerting prominent, responsible news outlets (TV, radio, and print) serving the affected jurisdictions.
The requirement to provide due notice must apply even to preliminary findings subject to further verification at a later date. Since such preliminary notice will help assure diligent follow-through.
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The The Public Must Be Informed of Environmental Hazards petition to U.S. House and Senate was written by Jon Yaffe and is in the category Environment at GoPetition.