RE: Draft EPA Documents

[Sue Darcey, Pesticide Report <sdarcey@erols.com>]

Ellie,

You are probably not going to like this answer, because it 
may cost you some money, but getting at draft EPA documents
is one of the primary functions of the environmental newsletter
reporter.

There are about 80-100 environmental newsletters following all
the different EPA media (Air, water, Superfund, Pesticides) issues 
out there; their subscription costs range from about $199 to 
$2,000 per year. The publishers who run these newsletters make 
their money from companies, attorneys, state governments and 
other interested parties who need to know what a particular EPA
program office's next move is going to be, but who can't afford
to keep a full time person in Washington chasing after
all the environmental meetings, hearings, etc., in their field 
of interest.

Most of the newsletter companies keep some sort of document service
or are happy to provide the draft EPA documents they base their
stories on to their subscribers; people who routinely read my
newsletter, Pesticide Report, (especially enviro groups)will call
me up asking me for a draft, and if it's under 15 pages, I'm usually
happy to fax it to them, for free.

The good news is that many libraries subscribe to these newsletters
or know which library does so that you can look at them for free.
The newsletters range in frequency from dailies, to weeklies, to
biweeklies and monthlies, and a lot of them are available online.

The way we environmental and trade press reporters find out about
draft EPA documents is to obsessively follow a "beat" -- i.e.,
we read every Federal Register notice in our media area, attend
every EPA meeting that might have something to do with our area,
regularly go to the docket rooms covering our field, and routinely
call up key EPA staff people and ask them what they are working on.

"Inside EPA" and "Bureau of National Affairs" are two of the big
independent publishing companies in Washington D.C. that keep 
huge stables of environmental reporters covering every enviro issue imaginable;
there are also smaller outfits that do a respectable job.

There is so much going on at EPA, and some of these drafts are 
so sensitive, I'm not sure that they will ever all be posted
on the Internet.

Sue Darcey, Pesticide Report