Exxon station
BOSTON – Massachusetts is asking for extra time to respond to a records request involving Exxon, which wonders why the State has sued it over climate change while ignoring its own emissions standards.
A Suffolk County judge is already irritated with how long the issue has taken, but the state Department of Environmental Protection last week filed an emergency motion to extend a key deadline to search records involving the “executive office.” It’s part of an open-records lawsuit pursued by Exxon lawyer Jack Pirozzolo, who wonders if the State is hiding potentially embarrassing documents.
Some records have already revealed Massachusetts never complied with regulations the DEP was charged with enforcing under a 2008 law. Those regulations, detailed in a report by the CommonWealth Beacon, require Massachusetts agencies that operate more than 30 vehicles to compile a variety of statistics including CO2 emissions and post the results on a public website.
Yet the State has sued Exxon, alleging it misled investors and consumers on climate change. Exxon, in turn, has sued the State over its response to Pirozzolo’s records request.
“(A)fter more than 15 months of insisting it would find no more documents even were it ‘to look again,’ DEP looked again and found responsive public records its initial search had missed,” the company wrote last week.
“Defendants identified and produced several emails to executive offices about ‘next steps’ they ‘should take to comply’ with Section 60.06, including information they needed to submit. These emails, which DEP had never before produced, are plainly responsive to the lawful request…”
Judge Robert Gordon had imposed a deadline last week for briefs on summary judgment that the State couldn’t comply with. Its emergency motion said that during a recent deposition, “it became clear that Mr. Pirozzolo had a broader interpretation of the term ‘Executive Office’ used in his public records request than DEP had used when searching for and responding to that request.”
The open-records lawsuit parallels the state’s lawsuit claiming ExxonMobil caused increased global warming by misleading consumers about the effects of burning hydrocarbon fuels. As part of its defense, the oil company sought records detailing how Massachusetts had failed to enforce its own climate law requiring the DEP to collect data on vehicle emissions, including by the state’s own fleet of buses and other vehicles.
After the judge in the climate case rejected ExxonMobil’s discovery request, Pirozzolo filed an open-records request on the letterhead of his law firm, Sidley Austin. Massachusetts officials went about collecting the documents until officials in the governor’s office of Energy and Environmental Affairs realized Pirozzolo represented ExxonMobil, then blocked the release of the information.
The State reversed course last year and turned over what it said were all relevant documents not covered by the attorney-client privilege. ExxonMobil argues the State couldn’t have turned over everything, since entire department areas were said to have nothing, and disputes the state’s assertion of privilege.
Whether local and state officials can sue the energy industry over climate change is a question currently being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has scheduled oral arguments for Oct. 5.
