Cross-Cutting Teams Will Speed EPA Work, New York-Area Boss Says

The new head of the EPA’s dense New York-New Jersey region says she’s knitting together different departments to work jointly—an approach aimed at speeding up work while bolstering environmental justice.

Staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 2 have started organizing into new work groups to find cross-cutting issues on which they can team up, such as air emissions that overlap with water discharges in certain geographic areas, Regional Administrator Lisa Garcia told Bloomberg Law.

Those steps are especially important when it comes to addressing environmental justice—which Garcia pegged as her top priority—because so many low-income communities of color are ...