Laura Malone.
The following Article is based on comments given by Laura Malone at “Saving the Deal: Avoiding and Minimizing Environmental Liability in Corporate and Real Estate Transactions,” a continuing legal education seminar. The information contained below is a summary of information available through the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (“ADEQ”) at http://www.azdeq.gov/ and from various ADEQ documents.
Those of you in the environmental field back in 1970 may remember the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”). Subsequent to NEPA, and later that same year, then President Richard Nixon signed an Executive Order creating the United States Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”). Both NEPA and EPA were predicated on public concerns that, as a nation, we were not focusing on the environment or even had an understanding of how human activity could have an impact on the environment. The creation of EPA and subsequent legislation, such as the Clean Water Act (“CWA”), Clean Air Act (“CAA”), Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (“RCRA”), and Superfund, to name just a few, started the environmental regulatory transformation.