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Sucking the Superfund dry
As the Superfund cleanup slows to a crawl, we're in
deep toxic doo-doo.
From Muckraker
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By Amanda Griscom
May 7, 2004 | Arsenic in water, mercury emissions,
new-source review, Dick Cheney's energy task force --
these are the issues that have elicited the loudest
howls of protest about the Bush administration's
environmental record during the past three years. By
comparison, the grumbling over Superfund has been
remarkably muted.
But lately the grumble has risen to a growl. In late
April, Time magazine ran a feature by Margot Roosevelt
titled "The Tragedy of Tar Creek," which exposed what
it called "eco-assault on an epic scale." The article
looked at a neglected Superfund site that has led to
widespread lead poisoning, among other scourges, in a
nearby Oklahoma community -- where "Little League
fields have been built over an immense underground
cavity that could collapse at any time. Acid mine
waste flushes into drinking wells ... [and]
neon-orange scum oozes onto the roadside. Wild onions,
a regional delicacy tossed into scrambled eggs, are
saturated with cadmium."
It's one thing to lament this particularly egregious
case; it's another to accept that the Tar Creek
tragedy is just one of many Superfund screw-ups. As
Roosevelt's article pointed out, Tar Creek can be
counted among 29 other cleanup projects in 17 states
that stalled out because they were underfunded by the
U.S. EPA last year, according to the agency's
inspector general's office.
Since President Bush took office, the Superfund
program's budget has decreased by 25 percent in
inflation-adjusted dollars, and some 50 percent fewer
sites have been cleaned up, according to a report
produced by the Sierra Club and the U.S. Public
Interest Research Group Education Fund. In fiscal year
2003, the Bush administration completed cleanups at
only 40 Superfund toxic-waste sites, whereas an
average of 87 Superfund cleanups were completed per
year between 1996 and 2000.
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Industry representatives and Bush officials argue that
these numbers are misleading because many of the
easiest-to-tackle Superfund sites were cleaned up
early in the program's history, leaving behind bigger,
more complex sites that take longer to deal with.
Environmentalists counter that so-called mega-sites
have been part of the agency's agenda for decades, and
the shortfall is due to meager funding and a flimsy
commitment to the Superfund cause.
"The Bush administration has watched the Superfund
program dwindle to a shadow of itself. It's in the
worst shape since it was passed by Congress in 1980,"
said Grant Cope, an environmental attorney who
specializes in toxic waste. "The data unequivocally
show that there has been a dramatic slowdown in the
pace of cleanups at the nation's worst toxic-waste
sites and a reduction in the number of new sites that
EPA is listing as eligible for cleanup. Both problems
are due to gross deficiencies in funding."
Granted, this is partly attributable to circumstances
that predate the Bush administration. In 1995, the GOP
majority in Congress refused to reauthorize a tax
levied on polluting industries that supplied the
grubstake for the Superfund and enabled the EPA to
clean up contaminated sites even if the costs were too
high for a polluting company to handle. That tax
hasn't been renewed since.
Then again, the Bush administration is the first ever
to argue against the tax and refuse to advocate for it
on Capitol Hill; moreover, the administration has made
only meager efforts to replenish the fund by other
means. Although the White House did request an
increase in Superfund allocations for fiscal year
2004, which Congress refused to grant, "it was clear
their request was placed at the bottom of their list
of priorities," said Cope. "Over and over again, this
is an administration that has proven it can force its
priorities through Congress. Superfund is simply not a
priority."
But while the Bush administration has been remiss on
the funding front, it did make an effort to shape the
future of Superfund through creating a subcommittee
under the EPA's National Advisory Council for
Environmental Policy and Technology (NACEPT). After 22
months of investigation and debate, and more than $1
million in taxpayer dollars to fund the deliberations,
the subcommittee released its report [PDF] in
mid-April with recommendations for the Superfund
program. That report got virtually no media coverage,
other than a brief mention in the Time article as the
reason that Superfund advocates are "bracing for a new
battle."
"While the [subcommittee] process highlighted the need
to address serious problems with the Bush
administration's implementation of the program, the
report was biased, unacceptable and off the mark,"
said Cope, one of the subcommittee's 32 members. So
unacceptable did he find its recommendations, in fact,
that he was one of five subcommittee members who
refused to sign the final document. Other dissenters
included representatives from the Sierra Club, the
Center for Public Environmental Oversight, and the New
Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Chief among their concerns was that the report's
conclusions disproportionately represented the
interests of an industry-stacked panel: "Two-thirds of
committee members represented the interests of PRPs
[potentially responsible parties] -- corporations
responsible for toxic-waste sites listed on
[Superfund's] National Priorities List," said Vicky
Peters, a subcommittee participant from the Colorado
attorney general's office. "Not just executives, but
people who have a stake in the PRPs -- scrap
recyclers, lobbyists, insurers, legal reps,
developers. These are all people who have liabilities
or who represent companies with liabilities."
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Not surprisingly, the industry-heavy committee blocked
any recommendations that would increase funding for
the Superfund program -- presumably for fear that it
would empower the EPA to issue more administrative
orders forcing them to pony up cleanup funds.
"It got ugly," Cope told Muckraker. "During
deliberations there were strained discussions between
the members. There were people yelling in the room,
pointing fingers. It was not a pretty sight. Some of
us came out of that process pretty bruised up."
Industry folks agreed that the atmosphere was
contentious and were hesitant to comment on the
subcommittee's deliberations. "I'm very guarded about
discussing this," Lindene Patton, vice president and
counsel for the insurance company Zurich Specialties,
told Muckraker. "The funding discussion in particular
got heated, very politicized in my opinion. It took on
a life of its own."
Another committee member, Sue Briggum, a longtime
lobbyist for Waste Management and now director of
environmental affairs for the company, expressed
similar sentiments: "You'd have to be dead not to
realize how politicized these issues are right now in
an election year. I'm cautious about discussing this
because the issues can be spun in ways I'm not
comfortable with -- like the claims by some that the
'polluter pays' principle has gone out the window.
That's patently untrue."
While it's true that roughly 70 percent of all
Superfund cleanups are paid for directly by the
polluters, some 30 percent are so-called orphan sites
that polluters don't have the funds to deal with.
That's where the polluter tax comes in: The pooled tax
revenues from chemical-producing and polluting
industries pay for orphan-site cleanups as well as for
oversight on the other projects. But with the tax no
longer being collected, mom-and-pop taxpayers are
stuck with the bill. In 2004, taxpayers are expected
to pay more than $1 billion for Superfund cleanups --
roughly 300 percent more than they paid for the
program in 1995, according to a U.S. PIRG analysis.
Industry argues that the polluter tax is unfair
because "it flies in the face of individual
accountability. It's just generic accountability,"
says Briggum. "Should a company help pay for a
contaminated site even if they didn't contaminate it,
just because they are part of an industry -- or should
general revenues be used? I don't think it's
self-evident who it ought to be."
To environmentalists (and even to the Reagan and Bush
I administrations, which supported the polluter tax),
the logic was clear enough. As Cope explains it, "If
industries are earning profits off the sale and use of
products that contaminate the environment, they are
more directly associated with [the consequences] than
taxpayers."
In March, Senate Democrats lost an effort to reinstate
the polluter tax by only seven votes. That prompted
the Sierra Club to air TV spots in swing states with a
"Make Polluters Pay" slogan, and on tax day, enviros
protested at post offices in 25 states to drive the
issue home to taxpayers.
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Still, industry-oriented members of the subcommittee
managed to keep a funding recommendation out of the
NACEPT report entirely, arguing that money is
Congress' domain and the subcommittee should focus on
the way Superfund is managed, a matter that EPA can
directly control.
Environmentalists decried this effort to pass the
buck: "Well, if the EPA isn't going to ask Congress
for money, who the heck will?" asked Cope.
According to Velma Smith, a Superfund specialist at
National Environmental Trust who sat in on a number of
the subcommittee meetings, the General Electric
representative Jane Gardner (referred to by some as
"G.E. Jane") didn't just dismiss the funding problem,
she denied it altogether: "According to my notes,
Gardner said she was 'totally opposed [to] and cannot
live with any recommendation for more money,'" Smith
told Muckraker. "She further added the even more
preposterous comment that 'This program is well funded
and always has been.'" Gardner did not return
Muckraker's calls.
Midway through the subcommittee deliberations, when it
became apparent that members would never reach
consensus on most major issues, EPA gave up on that
approach and advised the members to submit a range of
views. Problem is, the range of views were published
without attribution, and many that came from industry
could weaken Superfund's protections. "The final
conclusions drawn in the report totally lacked
accountability, and basically gave [industry's
unattributed recommendations] as much legitimacy and
weight as the consensus recommendations," said Jessica
Frohman, a Sierra Club toxic-waste specialist who
served as an alternate representative on the
subcommittee.
Every dissenter who refused to sign the report agreed
that its first major flaw was the failure to
acknowledge the need for a significant, stable funding
source and to even entertain the idea of reinstituting
the tax on polluting industries. The program's dire
funding shortages were even acknowledged in an
internal EPA report quietly posted on the agency's Web
site this week, although no real funding solutions
were proposed.
Among the range of recommendations that dissenting
subcommittee members found problematic was the notion
that sites be added to Superfund's National Priority
List based on EPA's budgetary constraints, weighing
the financial viability of a site cleanup instead of
focusing on how much of a threat sites pose to public
health. Even more alarming to some was the suggestion
that sites be cleaned up based on their potential to
be redeveloped for commercial purposes -- a proposal
that would disadvantage the cleanup of sites in rural
communities and inner-city areas, which are less
favorable markets for commercial development.
"The most discouraging thing that came out of this
committee meeting is that it could change the
fundamental mission of Superfund," said Frohman. "This
was a program developed first and foremost to protect
human health, to save lives. These recommendations
have the potential to turn it into a program
contingent on expenses and affordability, rather than
protecting public health."
Cope also has concerns about the report's potential
ramifications: "If the Bush administration gets
reelected, I think that ... officials could use [the
report] to weaken the program -- either to change the
statutory language or undertake more subtle
administrative reforms. And the report would give them
political cover to do so."
These concerns loom large when you consider that one
out of every four Americans lives within four miles of
a Superfund site, according to the General Accounting
Office. That translates into 73 million Americans who
could be at risk of floating down Love Canal if
Superfund continues to be neglected.
salon.com
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