Accusations follow ouster of California regional boss

WASHINGTON >> The Environmental Protection Agency abruptly pushed out its top regional official for California and other points West, touching off an unusual public dispute between the two over the reason why.

Mike Stoker, the EPA’s chief for California and other far West states and territories since 2018, said he got a call Wednesday from senior agency officials in Washington telling him to resign.

The flare-up marks the latest political road bump for the Trump administration in California, a Democratic stronghold leading the ranks of states fighting the president on environmental and climate rollbacks and immigration issues.

In his farewell note to regional EPA staff, which Stoker provided to The Associated Press, Stoker said he believed his repeated clashes with the agency’s headquarters over unspecified “policy and non-policy items” helped prompt his removal.

But Stoker also wrote that he had been warned recently “that it wasn’t going unnoticed how many Democrat members in Congress were commending me for the job I was doing” on a contaminated site in San Francisco and other environmental issues in his region.

EPA spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer in Washington disputed Stoker’s account of the reason for his dismissal, however. In a statement Friday, Schiermeyer said it was normal for EPA regional bosses to “work in a bipartisan way.”

Instead, the EPA spokeswoman pointed to what she