On Thursday, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) presented a new version of legislation to overhaul chemical safety regulations, dissenting from a bipartisan bill that was still being negotiated more than a year after it was introduced. But Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, isn’t the only one putting up a fight: Several big players in the chemical industry have been laying out record amounts of money to influence regulatory legislation.

Despite its name, the Chemical Safety Improvement Act, an effort to overhaul the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, has been criticized by several environmental groups — and heartily approved by the American Chemistry Council. Since the bill was first introduced last year, the ACC’s spending on lobbying shot through the roof, reaching a record $12.3 million in 2013 and $6 million during the first two quarters of 2014. The Council, a major lobbying force in the chemical industry, has clearly made proposed changes to TSCA a top priority, citing the bill in nine lobbying filings just this year. Also weighing in on the bill: Eastman Chemical, maker of the coal-washing agents that leaked into Elk River in January, leading to a cutoff in the water supply for 300,000 West Virginians.

As we have reported on OpenSecrets Blog, the bill was modified drastically after the late Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) introduced a first version in April 2013, replaced by a version cosponsored by Lautenberg and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.). Vitter’s largest contributor by far is the oil and gas industry, which typically is no friend of more regulation. He counts Dow Chemical, Koch Industries and Murray Energy among his top 20 donors.

Since the Elk River spill, Eastman and the chemicals industry have had to play defense on another front as well. Within a month of the incident, legislators sought to tighten safety restrictions on chemical storage facilities. In late January, Boxer and the two Democratic senators from West Virginia, Joe Manchin and Jay Rockefeller, introduced the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act, a plan to impose yearly inspections on chemical tanks located near water supplies and require clear emergency response guidelines.

Meanwhile, Eastman’s lobbying costs floated up. Eastman spent $680,000 lobbying between April and June of 2014, which is more than the company has logged in a single quarter since 2008, when those expenses were first tallied on a quarterly basis. Its total for the first six months of this year: $1.2 million. Last year, the company spent $1.9 million, its largest lobbying tab on record.

Eastman spokeswoman Maranda Demuth said in an email that the expenditures were unrelated to the spill. Nevertheless, a new topic appeared on Eastman’s lobbying filings this year: the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act of 2014 — the bill to regulate chemical tanks. The firm has also lobbied since last year on the TSCA overhaul bill, the Chemical Safety Improvement Act, which it publicly supports.

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The American Chemistry Council has been more outspoken on the tanks bill, applauding modifications made in committee. “We welcome the progress that has apparently been made by Senators Manchin, Boxer and Vitter to refine the bill,” the company wrote in an April press release. “ACC looks forward to working with the Senate as the bill makes its way to the floor.” Vitter, the leading Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is not a cosponsor of the bill.

Erik Olson, an expert on toxic chemicals at the Natural Resources Defense Council who weighed in on the chemical tanks regulation bill, said the changes were a mixed bag but were mainly intended to get Republican lawmakers on board.

“They wouldn’t have been our first choice…[but] they clarified a few things,” Olson said. “We have learned through the negotiating process that substantial strengthening amendments were going to lose bipartisan support.” The modifications include narrowing the scope of the bill to chemical tanks instead of a broader range of facilities and increasing the frequency of inspections — but also allowing some of them to be conducted by industry-hired engineers.

Environmental advocates had stronger words for the ACC- approved Chemical Safety Improvement Act, the TSCA overhaul that they say could weaken states’ authority to regulate chemicals and also allow thousands more to remain untested. The bill “would be compounding one environmental disaster with another,” wrote Daniel Rosenberg, another NRDC researcher, in a blog post. Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, an advocacy group backing stricter regulations, supported the earlier version of the bill introduced by Lautenberg. But it criticized the bill in its modified form, and told OpenSecrets Blog that the measure “continues the status quo” with regards to providing health safety information to the public.

Duke Energy, the owner of the North Carolina electricity plant that leaked coal dust into the Dan River in February, has lobbied on both bills as well. Duke has spent $3.3 million lobbying this year, not out of line with previous outlays, but its political contributions have spiked up dramatically during the 2014 cycle. Duke’s PAC has given out $648,000 to federal candidates so far — more than it has ever doled out even in a full two-year cycle.

These trends are in line with the chemical industry’s growing interest in influencing bills through the avenue of K Street. It spent a record $62 million on lobbying in 2013 — an amount it is on track to beat, with $36.2 million already dropped in the first half of the year.



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