By: Lani Wean, West Virginia Field Organizer
Date: July 22, 2026
About: Docket No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-1212-0001
To: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
My name is Lani Wean, and I am the West Virginia Field Organizer for Moms Clean Air Force. As a resident of West Virginia, a state whose air, water, and soil quality has been repeatedly threatened by pollution from industry development, I have a responsibility to speak up as EPA delivers yet another blow to our safety and security by way of this proposal. I am testifying today to make it clear that I strongly oppose EPA's proposal to gut public participation requirements for Clean Air Act “minor source” New Source Review (NSR) programs approved into State Implementation Plans, or SIPs.
West Virginians are often stereotyped as poor, dumb, or having chosen lives of economic and industry exploitation. In reality, folks here have faced decades of corruption seeping into the cracks of almost every major institution. This state has been ransacked by greedy industry, regulatory bodies, lawmakers, or power-hungry people making decisions behind closed doors and without public input. I have no doubt that this proposal will exacerbate those very issues.
This proposal could allow petrochemical facilities and other heavy polluters to move forward with building polluting projects without notifying the public and without any meaningful community input. With this proposal, state and local entities that govern the minor NSR process could decide that community input isn’t necessary for a given project—which is the exact opposite of what we need here for sustainable economic development.
Right up the road from my house is the town of Institute, West Virginia, where you can find a massive chemical manufacturing campus, on which you will find Union Carbide’s ethylene-oxide facility. Here in the Chemical Valley, as many call it, the total cancer risk has been estimated to be 366 in 1 million, or 10th highest in the country. Furthermore, based on EPA-approved air quality models, recent data showed that the cancer risk surrounding this Union Carbide ethylene oxide facility was 600-in-1 million, six times the 100-in-1 million risk level that EPA itself has used to determine regulatory limits for polluting facilities.
Do you want to know what some of the facilities on this campus are now trying to do? You guessed it—they’re seeking to reclassify as minor area sources, disregarding cumulative emissions. Even after years of community outcry and opposition from local health and environmental groups, the WV Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) continues to only consider emissions from each independent facility—leading to even greater air pollution in our communities.
Classification as a minor pollution source does not mean that the pollution from a given facility is insignificant. West Virginia already must contend with a DEP that does not consider cumulative pollution like the campus I just mentioned, which uses piecemeal permitting methods so their large projects may be broken down into smaller units to avoid triggering major source status. By gutting the public participation requirements of the minor NSR programs, EPA is literally taking away the opportunity for fenceline communities such as mine to be notified about the pollution from new or expanding facilities, and to speak out about their potential harm to our families and livelihoods.
Claiming this proposal is meant to streamline industry development is at the very least a half-truth and, at the most, an egregious lie. What it really does is put even more of a burden on those of us living in the path of pollution from minor sources—and it shuts out community voices in the process. By removing public input requirements for some of the worst-polluting facilities in our communities, including data centers, petrochemical facilities, and other oil and gas facilities, this proposal sabotages one of the few regulatory tools that communities have to protect our health and safety from toxic pollution.
To reiterate: Moms Clean Air Force strongly opposes EPA's proposal to gut the public participation components of the minor New Source Review program. I oppose this for the sake of my and my community’s future, and with the goal of honest economic growth in West Virginia. We deserve development that does not further endanger us and that welcomes and even encourages public input on new or expanding projects. Thank you.