The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that Mike Martucci, a former New York State senator, business owner and farmer, was appointed by President Donald Trump to head the agency’s Region 2, which includes New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, eight federally recognized Indian Nations and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In a call with the Source Wednesday, Martucci credited his team with getting him up to speed on issues at the forefront of Virgin Islanders’ minds. Asked about what his appointment and the returning Trump administration could mean for a restart of the St. Croix refinery, Martucci said he’s still looking into the facility’s history and potential future.
“What I will say most broadly is that the things that we’re talking about here, and the work the [Port Hamilton Refining and Transportation] team is doing, falls firmly into the area of allowing the economy to thrive, and that’s something, as you probably are well aware, that the administration — the Trump administration — is very focused on,” he said.
From the EPA’s perspective, he said, “What that really means, at the highest level, is that we ensure that we are protecting the environment — we’re protecting the people that live near PHRT — if the plan is that the facility is going to reopen.”
A restart — and expansion — is certainly part of Gov. Albert Bryan Jr.’s plan. During his seventh State of the Territory Address last month, Bryan said his administration is working with Port Hamilton, federal agencies and other stakeholders “all with a shared vision of evolving this vital facility into something far more than just a refinery.”
“My support is not just for the safe restart of the refinery, but for it to become a model for the global energy industry — embracing advanced technologies, environmental stewardship, and cutting-edge practices that will redefine how energy companies operate in the 21st century,” he said later in the speech.
Bryan projected that an up-and-running facility could generate more than $45 million directly to the Virgin Islands government while creating upward of 400 jobs.
“[R]emember, the refinery started, and in order to get the refinery started, I had to … act as an intermediary and call the Trump people, right, who forced the rank and file EPA people to come to some reasonable agreement, and that’s how we got the refinery on,” he said during an interview with the Source later that week.
That attempted restart would prove disastrous, and in 2021, the EPA ordered former owners Limetree Bay Refining to shut the facility down amid releases of noxious odors and oil droplets that showered residents’ homes, tainting cisterns.
Bryan said he had already told the owners to cease operations.
“I called the refinery and told them, ‘Listen, shut it down.’ The EPA then called them and said, ‘Oh, you have a mandatory shutdown,’” he said. “They never really shut the refinery down. It was already down when they made that edict. But Biden is gone, and Trump is in.”
Bryan went on to characterize former EPA Administrator Michael Regan, whom he did not name, as a “terrorist.”
“I mean, he was just unreasonable in terms of what they’re trying to do to us,” he said. “And they told us clearly: they don’t care about our economy. All they care about is their mandate by the EPA. And that is really victimization of a society.”
Bryan will likely find friendlier ears in the current administration. On Jan. 29, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Lee Zeldin, a former congressman from New York’s first congressional district, to oversee the EPA. Within the week, the agency unveiled Zeldin’s “Powering the Great American Comeback” initiative, which highlighted five priority areas. The first of those was titled “Clean Air, Land and Water for Every American.” The second was “Restore American Energy Dominance,” and the third was “Permitting Reform, Cooperative Federalism, and Cross-Agency Partnership.”
Government House Communications Director Richard Motta Jr. told the Source last Friday that conversations with the EPA were high on Bryan’s list for an upcoming trip to the nation’s capital.
“And based on the initial meetings that we had … during the transition of the Trump administration — when we were in Washington in December — we were getting some positive feedback,” he said. “And so we just kind of want to build on those conversations when we go back up.”
Since assuming the role of EPA administrator, Zeldin has taken several steps to align the agency with Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce and roll back Biden-era policies. On Tuesday, the agency announced via press release that it had placed 11 diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility — or DEIA — employees and 160 employees working on environmental justice on leave. Last week, The New York Times reported that more than a thousand probationary EPA employees were told via email that they could be fired “immediately.”
On Wednesday, Martucci described the employees under him in glowing terms.
Since his appointment, he said, “The first thing I found, which was so exciting and so energizing, was a group of professional career staff here that are focused, dedicated — I’m talking about people that have scientific backgrounds — and I’ve even had the opportunity to meet the small-but-mighty team that we have there in the V.I. that’s working on the ground there each and every day,” he said, praising the agency’s Caribbean office.
Martucci said he intended to rely on “the career staff, the folks who have been here doing this work, to provide guidance, advice, suggestions, and to really help the region chart a path forward on many of these issues, alongside of me as the new leader here in the region.”
Asked about whether that infrastructure would remain in place, Martucci said, “It’s a little early to tell on some of those things,” singling out Trump’s directive that remote and telecommuting employees return to the office.
“The president has been focused on a restored accountability as it pertains to policymaking staff, a restored accountability for career executives — you know, what that all means in terms of how it actually translates down in the agency? A lot of that is still coming,” he said. “A lot of those presidential priorities are still being communicated to us.”
Martucci said his focus now was on implementing those priorities and making adjustments as necessary.
“You know, that might mean that we’re working a little leaner when this is all done. I don’t think we really have — certainly, from my level, I don’t have a scope of understanding of exactly what that means yet,” he said. “But … I think that there are certainly going to be structural changes to the federal workforce as a result of the president’s orders, and we’re ready here to address those as they come.”
Asked to describe his environmental record, Martucci went back to his childhood on his family’s dairy farm in Orange County, New York. Though it’s no longer operational, Martucci said his family still runs an approximately 13,000-tree apple orchard.
“So really, my connection to the environment began as a small kid, a small child … being on the family farm, growing up and working on the family farm, learning what it meant to be a good steward of the land,” he said.
After college, Martucci founded a school busing company and in 2020, he won a seat in the New York State Senate serving the state’s 42nd district. The New York State League of Conservation Voters gave him a 71 percent rating on its 2022 environmental scorecard. That rating was in sight of some low-scoring Democrats and among the highest given to Republican lawmakers.
Martucci said environmental issues were a focus of his term in office.
“Here in the State of New York, I was a Republican who supported the state’s Environmental Bond Act, which was a huge piece of legislation that eventually worked its way all the way to voter referendum, which sent billions of dollars on climate issues, resiliency issues, issues having to do with land preservation and the environment,” he said. “I got to work on clean water issues in my district, I got to work on land preservation issues. So as a legislator, working on those things was really important to me in particular.”
Martucci said those efforts were squarely in line with Zeldin’s mission plan for the EPA.
