Facing an increasing backlog of sites with the same meager budget, the Superfund program administrator thinks he’s found a new way to tackle the country’s most severe hazardous waste problems: Stop addressing them. Superfund Program Looking for New Solutions On Dec. 2, Thomas P. Dunne, acting administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) office of solid waste and emergency response, announced at an academic Superfund conference that the agency might temporarily discontinue listing new Superfund sites. Facing a fiscal crunch, the agency is considering ceasing to list new sites and holding off new cleanup projects until work on current projects is completed as a way of focusing the program’s resources on existing problems. The comments sparked outrage from Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-VT), who said, “We have already dried up the funds needed to clean up the toxic sites we currently know about; now the Bush administration suggests sticking our head in the sand and not even [taking inventory of] other polluted sites. The millions of Americans who live within a short distance of a contaminated site want real solutions, starting with fully funding the program and reauthorizing the expired polluter pays fees. We should be working to protect our environment and public health by cleaning up more sites, faster, rather than shirking our responsibility.” Dunne also suggested two other approaches that may help stretch Superfund’s dismal $450 million budget: creating economic incentives for businesses to clean up sites and creating a management system that would allow communities to have more of a realistic view of cleanup costs and priorities. Dunne insisted that the agency is not married to any of the ideas, but that they highlight the need for serious dialogue on how best to tackle cleanup of the hundreds of severe toxic waste sites around the country. A Price We All Pay The Price Tag of Hazardous Waste: $253 Billion A recent EPA report projects that at the current pace, it will take between 30 and 35 years and $253 billion dollars to cleanup most of the nation’s known and yet-to-be-discovered toxic waste sites. This figure is significantly higher than EPA’s last estimate, released in 1996, that cleanup would cost $187 billion over 30 years. EPA projects that it will have to remediate at least 294,000 hazardous waste sites — and that number could go as high as 355,000. That estimate includes the 77,000 hazardous waste sites that have already been discovered plus 217,000 yet-to-be-discovered sites. According to the report, the $253 billion price tag will be borne predominately by the polluters. Less than 1 percent of all hazardous waste sites are part of the Superfund program, which includes only the worst toxic waste messes, but Superfund cleanups account for 15 percent of the total projected cost. Currently there are 456 Superfund sites remaining to be remediated, and EPA expects to find approximately 280 more. Administration Allows Taxpayers to Foot the Bill The Superfund program was started during the Reagan administration to locate, investigate and clean up the nation’s worst toxic waste sites. As originally conceived, the Superfund would pay for cleanups using money primarily from an industry-financed trust fund. This fund was created through a tax imposed mainly on chemical and petroleum companies, who are accountable for most of the industrial waste in toxic sites. In 1995 Congress failed to reauthorize the Superfund tax, and the resources used to clean up toxic waste dumps have since dwindled. Bush opposed reauthorization, allowing the fund to go bankrupt in October 2003 and forcing taxpayers rather than polluters to bear the brunt of cleanup costs. ’All Appropriate Inquiries’ Rule Lets Developers Off the Hook Even without the fund, EPA is only supposed to tap into taxpayer money after obtaining funding from all liable parties, yet recent policy changes have limited the liability of those involved. In one recent move, EPA issued a new regulation that weakens the environmental standard for appropriate inquiry into the history and environmental condition of brownfields, shielding potential developers from future liability. The standards are required by the 2002 brownfields law, which provides incentives for redeveloping former toxic sites without sacrificing public health and safety. The weakened environmental standard prompted five Democratic lawmakers to submit comments to EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt (whom President Bush has nominated to be his new secretary of Health and Human Services), charging that the new regulation is inconsistent with the intention of Congress and the brownfields law and that the weakened standard “will result in more contaminated sites going undiscovered, allowing contamination to go unaddressed and allowing a continuing threat to public health and the environment.” Along with their complaints, Reps. John Dingell (D-MI), Hilda Solis (D-CA), and Frank Pallone (D-NJ) joined Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Jeffords in attacking the new regulation for failing to require that an environmental professional conduct the inquiry, thus increasing the possibility that environmental problems will be missed. The lawmakers noted that “the probability of missing an environmental problem becomes unacceptably high when the person conducting the inquiry on the ground does not have the experience or judgment of an environmental professional. The consequences are serious.” The new rule also allows for exemptions to the brownfields law requirement that visual inspections of the facilities and adjoining properties be conducted as part of the inquiry. Such exemptions include weather, the location of the property, and refusal of the seller to allow access despite good faith efforts by the purchaser. The lawmakers note that the “opportunity for mischief is great” if such exemptions are allowed. “Actual visual inspection of a facility is central to every environmental inquiry,” the lawmakers contend. The letter further asserts that the standard would:

• Allow sellers of contaminated property to “take excess profits from the sale of the property and put those profits out of reach before the need for cleanup is known”;
• Increase the likelihood that taxpayers will bear the cost of cleanup when contamination is found; and
• Allow purchasers to claim liability exemption despite the weakness of the inquiry standard and to take no further action to investigate or cleanup environmental problems.

Lawmakers, IG Call for Reinstatement of Polluters Fees At a time when one in four Americans live within four miles from a Superfund site, 34 out of the 61 total ongoing Superfund projects did not receive funding in 2004, according to an EPA letter to Jeffords. In October, Jeffords and Boxer sent a letter to Leavitt demanding that the polluter fees be reinstated to pay for future cleanups and that the Superfund program be fully funded. Even the Inspector General has called for hundreds of millions more in the agency’s $450 million budget in order to meet the increasing backlog of site cleanups. However, increased funding has yet to arrive and taxpayers, not polluters, continue to pay the cost of cleanup.