LANSING, MI — New legislation has sprouted in lame duck session that public health advocates say would lock Michigan environmental regulators into using potentially outdated science when deciding how much cleanup a toxic contamination site requires.

The Senate Natural Resources Committee is scheduled to hear SB 1244 this week during meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday. Among other things, it would curb the state’s ability to consider scientific studies on the health impacts of toxic chemical exposure beyond those used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmental policy experts call the bill an end-run around a years-long process underway at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to update the safety thresholds known as criteria values that regulators use to oversee cleanup at pollution sites.

The bill also appears to incorporate elements of stalled legislation meant to block Michigan from passing regulations more stringent than baseline federal standards.

Sen. Jim Stamas, R-Midland, introduced the bill Nov. 29.

It joins other lame duck bills either passed by or moving through the committee, chaired by Sen. Tom Casperson, R-Escanaba, which are intended to scale-back state or local environmental regulations related to, among other things, tree trimming and wetlands protection.

Stamas said the legislation is intended to address sticking points between the DEQ and private industry in a protracted effort to update Michigan pollution cleanup standards under Part 201 of the state’s Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act.

The state has, for years, been going through more than 300 toxic chemicals to update cleanup standards based on advancements in scientific understanding of the risk posed by exposure. The standards are a controlling factor in toxic cleanups that, among other things, dictate which sites are considered contaminated, how polluters tackle a cleanup, and how much work they end up doing.

The update was expected to wrap up this year, but likely will not.

Business groups like the Michigan Chemistry Council (MCC), one of many “stakeholders” in the cleanup criteria updates, say the lengthy process has “left many parties uncertain as to the requirements and application of the generic cleanup criteria.”

“Over the past decade, a number of improvements to the Part 201 program have enabled increased remediation activity and growing success in moving forward with previously-contaminated sites,” said John Dulmes, director of the MCC, which “supports SB 1244 as a means of ensuring that this important work continues.”

But environmental and public health advocates are worries that, as written, the bill forces the DEQ to rely only on toxicity data from the EPA Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) database when setting cleanup standards under Part 201.

That’s problematic because, according to James Clift, policy director at the Michigan Environmental Council who served on a DEQ advisory group that helped draft updated criteria, “basically, this provision would tie Michigan’s hands and force DEQ to use old science when determining whether or not a standard was protective of human health.”

Clift said the IRIS database has suffered from a similar problem as the DEQ’s Part 201 criteria — it hasn’t been continually updated to reflect newer toxicity studies for older, more well-known chemicals, and it doesn’t have toxicity values for some emerging contaminants like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

Once a contaminant has been entered into the IRIS database, “sometimes they don’t get back to it for decades,” he said. “There’s many instances in those updates where there’s an IRIS number today, but the DEQ used a more recent study or science to update its numbers."

The database does not have toxicity values for PFOS or PFOA, two individual PFAS compounds for which the state developed its own groundwater criteria in January.

The DEQ used that enforceable standard to sue Wolverine World Wide in federal court. The state and two local townships are negotiating with the shoemaker — which polluted the groundwater in northern Kent County with PFAS by dumping tannery waste into unlined landfills and gravel pits — to pay for extending municipal water to contaminated areas.

Legislation critics worry the bill would nullify those state-specific standards, leaving nothing in place until the DEQ promulgated new rules — an already lengthy process made more complex by a pair of new governor-appointed review panels with the power to veto proposed DEQ rules and overturn permitting decisions.

The DEQ declined to comment on the bill.

Stamas, reached by phone Monday, said the legislation includes a process that would allow the DEQ to work with emerging contaminants not within the IRIS database, but declined to elaborate. “I’m not going to get into the whole bill,” he said. The bill does include language directing the state to consider final minimum risk levels from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) in the absence of values in the IRIS database.

Stamas called the IRIS database the “gold standard.”

When asked why he introduced it in lame duck session, Stamas said he’s been working on the bill for more than a year and “this is when I was able to get consensus on the largest part of it.”

Stamas said he’s worked with “a lot of stakeholders” in drafting the bill, naming specifically the Legislative Service Bureau and Warner Norcross & Judd attorney Troy Cumings. The law firm represents Wolverine World Wide and Cumings lobbies for the company.

Stamas said he’s open “to work with all stakeholders to improve the legislation.”

“I think we’ve gone too long without updating 201,” he said. “I hope that by addressing key issues here we can finally bring strong policies to protect our women, children and the residents of Michigan in the future.”