Month: August 2022

• President Joe Biden has said he will announce a decision on student-loan relief before August 31.
• The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Tuesday that he wasn’t ready to announce.
• Borrowers are awaiting an announcement on debt cancellation and a payment-pause extension.

With the potential for broad student-loan relief and an extension of the payment pause, August is a high-stakes month for millions of federal borrowers.

But it appears President Joe Biden isn’t quite prepared to announce relief.

Biden said last month that he would give himself until August 31 to decide on broad student-loan forgiveness. That’s also when payments are set to resume. He’s said to be considering $10,000 in relief for borrowers making under $150,000 a year. And while Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in June promised borrowers “ample notice” about any change to their balances, there hasn’t been an update.

The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters on Tuesday that Biden would stick with his end-of-August timeline.

“So we’re still kind of at the beginning, getting into the middle of August,” Jean-Pierre said. “So when he’s ready to make that decision, we will let you know.”

She said Biden “understands how student loans could affect a family and how the pressure of that can really be a lot and put a lot of weight on a family’s purse or economic situation,” adding: “So we understand that. He is making — he is going to make his decision on this, and when he has something to say, we will share that.”

Lawmakers, advocates, and student-loan companies have criticized the uncertainty surrounding student-loan payments. Some have speculated that Biden will extend the pandemic-era payment pause for the fifth time, as the Education Department recently instructed loan companies to halt messaging about payments resuming.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have requested information on how the department plans to execute student-loan relief efficiently, and while the department has not provided information, Politico recently obtained a memo outlining detailed plans to implement debt relief within months of Biden’s sign- off.

But borrowers have little time to prepare. Scott Buchanan, the executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, a trade group that represents federal student-loan servicers, told Insider earlier in August that companies should have been communicating with borrowers “a month ago.”

“And that needs to happen,” he said. “At this point, until the White House gives any different guidance, payments resume on September 1.”

While Republican lawmakers have criticized broad relief — three recently introduced legislation that would block Biden from implementing expansive loan forgiveness — some advocates want the president to go big to reach as many borrowers as possible.

Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, wrote a letter in July urging Biden to extend the payment pause and cancel at least $50,000 in student debt per borrower.

“The American people are anxious. Voters are anxious. Your base is anxious. Extending the freeze will only extend the anxiety that millions of Americans feel,” Johnson wrote. “Thus, any extension must be accompanied by meaningful cancellation,” he added. “We urge you to cancel a minimum of $50,000 as Black borrowers — drowning in an average of $53,000 in student debt — have virtually no realistic way to pay it back in today’s unjust economy.”

LANSING, MI — An employee at Tribar Technologies in Wixom overrode the company’s waste treatment alarms 460 times in the span of nearly three hours on the night which state regulators believe a toxic chemical release to the Huron River initially began last weekend.

That extraordinary detail is among new information about the circumstances surrounding a hexavalent chromium release to the Wixom wastewater system contained in violation notices issued by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE).

In an Aug. 9 “egregious” violation letter sent to Tribar, an auto supplier which manufacturers chrome-finished parts using toxic chemicals, state regulators demanded more information about what transpired at the company’s Wixom Plant No. 5 on Alpha Drive on Friday, July 29.

According to the EGLE notice, that’s when a 14,923-gallon rinse waste tank holding about 10,000 gallons of “acid etch material” with about five percent total chromium was emptied into the Wixom wastewater system as a contamination slug, which overwhelmed the sewage plant.

Wixon’s plant discharges to the Huron River via the Norton Creek drain upstream of Milford.

Between 4:59 and 7:46 pm on July 29, the tank operator overrode the waste treatment alarms 460 times, or about once every 20 seconds, according to the notice. Another “high level” alarm was recorded at 11 pm

How and why that occurred is unclear. EGLE says the company has not been fully forthcoming with its investigation, which involves the state’s criminal environmental investigative arm.

Tribar did not report the release until Monday, Aug. 1, when employee Ryan O’Keefe made an 8 am state Pollution Emergency Alert System (PEAS) report attributing the release to “operator error.”

“We have asked them repeatedly for critical information about their systems and the timeline for what happened. They have provided some information but have not provided the level of information we need for the investigation,” said EGLE spokesperson Hugh McDiarmid.

“That whole weekend timeline is not clear to us and they have not been helpful in putting it together,” McDiarmid said.

Last week, Tribar said it “took immediate action, including making certain the release was stopped and contacting the wastewater treatment plant” last Monday.

In a statement to MLive on Wednesday, Tribar said it was reviewing the violation notices with environmental consultants at Barr and August Mack and would share internal investigation findings this week.

The tank operator is no longer employed by Tribar, the company said.

“Tribar has invested millions of dollars in sophisticated environmental controls to prevent an accidental release of wastewater prior to treatment at our facility. Based on an initial investigation, those automated controls were all functioning properly at the time the plating solution was released to the wastewater treatment plant,” the company stated. “However, the controls were repeatedly overridden by the operator on duty while the facility was shut down for the weekend. That individual is no longer employed by our company, and we are in the process of further improving our internal controls to prevent a future occurrence.”

EGLE announced the violation notices on Wednesday, Aug. 10, more than a week after the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) issued an Aug. 2 ‘no contact’ advisory for the Huron River downstream of Wixom.

The violations are part of an “accelerated enforcement” process against Tribar which EGLE says will involve administrative consent negotiations and attempts at recovering costs incurred by the state in response to the spill, which has sparked a week of widespread testing on the river.

The company failed to immediately notify EGLE about the, interfered with a city’s wastewater treatment and failed discharge to maintain a pollution prevention plan, EGLE says.

The citations follow unrelated violation notices from the agency’s air quality division following a July inspection, which found the company was not keeping adequate records and was not properly operating equipment which controls nickel and chromium emissions.

Tribar has until Aug. 20 to respond to the water violations and Aug. 30 to respond to the air quality violations, EGLE said.

Tribar operates four plants in Wixom and two in Howell. The company was previously named Adept Plastic Finishing before it was acquired by HCI Equity Partners in 2016.

The state has maintained the contact advisory so far this week although river testing has turned up minimal detections of the contaminants, leading state and local officials to express optimism that the contaminants were largely bound up in filters at Tribar and the Wixom plant.

There has been widespread concern over the potential for contaminants to reach the city of Ann Arbor’s water intake downstream at Barton Pond, although computer modeling has shown that the slow-flowing river wouldn’t likely bring any chromium to the city for several weeks.

Hexavalent chromium, or hexchrome, is a carcinogenic chemical used in plastic finishing. It can cause a number of health problems through ingestion, skin contact or inhalation.

EGLE says its testing data has been turned over to DHHS, which is expected to make a determination on the continuance of the contact advisory in the coming days.

On Wednesday, activists outraged at the spill rallied at Heavner Canoe Rental in Milford to call for stronger polluter accountability laws and punitive action against Tribar.

The company has polluted the river before. Tribar is chiefly responsible for the existing “Do Not Eat” fish advisory in the river due to PFAS chemicals, which were also discharged to the river through the Wixom wastewater plant.

State Rep. Yousef Rabhi, D-Ann Arbor, led the crowd in chants of “shut them down!” and urged people to call lawmakers in Lansing to support “polluter pay” legislation.

“They need to be shut down. They need to be held accountable — GM, Ford, every single manufacturer needs to stop doing business with them,” said Rabhi.

“I want them sued into oblivion.”

Related stories:

Dingell seeks greater EPA hand in Huron River spill

EGLE finds low hexchrome in river testing

Tests encouraging, but worry and anger remain

Hexchrome could take weeks to reach Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor council OK’s legal action toward Tribar

Wixom police investigate Tribar hexchrome spill

Non-contact with Huron River urged after spill

It has been a major point of discussion around the world, however, as the live-fire military exercises China launched in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit raise fears it is looking to change the long-established status quo across the Taiwan Strait.

Chinese officials say it is the United States that is trying to change the status quo by strengthening its unofficial relations with Taiwan, a self-ruling island that Beijing claims as its territory.

“Faced with this, China has no choice but to fight back and defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu told Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on Tuesday.

But either way this latest crisis has sharpened global concerns about the future of the island, a longtime flashpoint in US-China relations and a flourishing democracy in a region where autocracy has been making steady gains.

‘We only want to protect our way of life‘

Lee Ming-che was among the human rights activists who met with Pelosi last week, during the brief visit in which she reiterated Washington’s support for Taiwan.

Lee spent five years in a Chinese prison as a political prisoner. Now, only four months after his release from him and return to Taiwan, Chinese threats to the freedoms he can again enjoy at home are escalating.

“I saw and personally experienced in prison how the Chinese government disregards human rights and the law. And now this kind of country wants to encroach on Taiwan’s democracy and human rights,” Lee told NBC News by phone on Tuesday.

“Because Taiwan’s previous generations have dedicated a lot of effort for Taiwan’s freedom, democracy and human rights, we only want to protect our way of life, to live in our own country, but China uses its military might to threaten Taiwan.”

Beijing’s military exercises around the island have gone further than in the past and than many experts had expected. On Wednesday, a spokesman for China’s Eastern Theater Command said the military had “successfully completed” various tasks around the island but would “carry out military training and preparedness continuously.”

“It is possible we will see the staging of additional military exercises, at intervals, over the coming months,” said Amanda Hsiao, senior analyst for China at the International Crisis Group, who is based in Taipei.

But for generations of people in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled in 1949 after losing to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in China’s civil war, these security concerns are nothing new. Co-existing with Beijing’s threats is simply part of life, which has carried on across Taiwan this summer as usual.

On Dongyin, a Taiwanese island just 31 miles off the coast of China, an electronic dance music rave with clouds of foam, fog and jets from water cannons kicked off on Saturday evening even as China’s military drills were unfolding in the surrounding skies and waters.