Polluted Sites Could Face Shortage of Cleanup Money

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/politics/16super.html?th

 

August 16, 2004

 

Polluted Sites Could Face Shortage of Cleanup Money

By FELICITY BARRINGER

 

WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 - With about six weeks left in the

federal government's fiscal year, dozens of Superfund

sites that are eligible for cleanup money are likely

to be granted nothing or a fraction of what their

managers say is needed because of a budget shortfall

that could exceed $250 million, according to a survey

by the Democratic staff of the House Energy and

Commerce Committee.

 

The list of sites was compiled from information

provided privately by officials at the Environmental

Protection Agency, according to a letter sent on

Friday to Michael O. Leavitt, the agency's

administrator, from Representative John D. Dingell of

Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

 

The letter and an attached list indicate that at sites

like Atlas Tack, a company that made tacks and nails

in Fairhaven, Mass., Omaha Lead in Omaha and Woolfolk

Chemical Works, in Fort Valley, Ga., cleanup managers

are likely to fall behind in clearing toxic residue

like lead particles, cyanide and arsenic in soil or

groundwater.

 

The original cleanup fund, built on industry taxes,

has dwindled to negligible levels in the nine years

since Congress abolished those taxes, so the money is

now almost entirely drawn from general tax revenue.

 

A subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee

recently recommended rejecting the E.P.A.'s request

for an additional $150 million for the next fiscal

year, which begins Oct. 1. Money for cleanup can be

allocated at any time in the fiscal year.

 

In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2003,

according to an inspector general's report, the

shortfall amounted to about $175 million.

 

" The trend is clear and is being ignored at the

expense of public health and the environment, " Mr.

Dingell said in his letter to Mr. Leavitt.

 

Thomas P. Dunne, the acting assistant administrator of

the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response at

the E.P.A., said that the final allocations " have to

wait till the end " of the fiscal year because in the

next few weeks, unspent money from other projects can

be harvested to fill some of the gap.

 

He added that he did not expect the shortfall to

continue growing indefinitely. " There are two

questions, " he said. " One, does Superfund have enough

money to start all the sites that have come on line? "

Indicating that the answer was no, he said, " obviously

it is not a good thing to have that backlog remain in

place for a long time. "

 

The second question, he said, was what was the risk to

the public. " In the short term it doesn't present any

risk, " he said.

 

" We're waiting for appropriations, and we've found

that some sites that may be potentially serious aren't

ready " for cleanup, Mr. Dunne said. The underlying

issue, he said, is that more than half of the

available cleanup money is being spent on nine huge

sites, including the Bunker Hill Mining and

Metallurgical Complex in Smelterville, Idaho; New

Bedford Harbor in Massachusetts, which is contaminated

by toxic chemicals once discharged by factories in the

area; and three sites in New Jersey - the Chemical

Insecticide site in Edison Township, the Federal

Creosote site in Manville and the Vineland Chemical

site in Vineland.

 

Katherine N. Probst, author of " Superfund's Future, " a

2001 report to Congress that predicted a growing

shortfall of money, said that people who live near the

affected sites will feel the financing squeeze. " These

people have been promised something they are not

getting, " she said. Delaying the cleanup of a problem

like groundwater pollution, she said, means " it

probably will cost us more in the long run. "

 

The shortage of cleanup money has existed for two

years, a period during which Superfund's budget has

remained flat at about $1.3 billion.

 

Cleanup money is divided into three pots - one for

emergency actions to safeguard human health, one for

assessments of longer-term problems, and the third for

" remedial action " or cleanup of pollution.

 

The E.P.A.'s money problems occur as the House

Appropriations Committee is making its final decisions

on the agency's budget for the next fiscal year.

 

The E.P.A.'s Superfund Web site said that as of

Friday, there were 1,242 sites on the national

priority list of sites approved for cleanup.

 

The most recent recommendations of a priority-setting

panel within the E.P.A. leave more than two dozen

sites that had been scheduled to receive planning or

cleanup money without any money at all, Mr. Dingell's

letter said. A dozen more are scheduled to get less

than the directors of E.P.A.'s regional offices had

requested, the letter added.

 

Around the Omaha Lead site - which was allocated about

15 percent less than the $6 million its managers had

requested, according to the Democratic staff report -

there are thousands of house yards where lead

contamination is suspected to be two or three times

greater than the level considered safe, according to

the E.P.A.'s summary documents about the site;

delaying financing is likely to mean delaying the

sampling of yards and identification of hazards.

 

Marion Pressure Treating, a site in northern

Louisiana, is facing its second rejection for

financing in the last two years. The assessment of the

site in the E.P.A.'s database indicates that the

volatile chemicals from the creosote used in wood

treatment presents " the potential for elevated

health/ecological risk levels. "

 

Woolfolk Chemical Works, in Fort Valley, Ga., is an

old pesticide and herbicide plant that was partially

cleaned in two projects in the 1990's. Officials at

the site held a public meeting a year ago to unveil a

further cleanup plan costing $21 million, The Macon

Telegraph reported. The figures reported by the House

Democratic staff members indicate that the site will

get $1.5 million, 25 percent of what its managers had

requested for this fiscal year.

 

Michael Cook, director of the Superfund office, said

in an interview Sunday: " It will be funded at the

level they can use this fiscal year, which won't be

much because we are so close to the year's end. Then

it will be much higher next year. "

 

In the case of a site like Omaha Lead, he added: " We

do have a number of sites that involve yard cleanups

where we are working through the yards on a priority

basis, but there definitely is exposure at the sites

we have not been able to get to. That's a matter of

the time it takes to undertake the cleanup actions. "