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Sunday, April 26, 2009

Environment - "Without Superfund Tax, Stimulus Aids Cleanups"

A long story today in the NY Times, reported by John M. Broder, begins:

VINELAND, N.J. — The Superfund program to clean up the nation’s most contaminated industrial sites was established nearly 30 years ago on the principle that those responsible for toxic pollution should pay for it.

So why is the government spending $600 million in stimulus money to work on sites like the defunct arsenic-fouled Vineland Chemical Company plant here in South Jersey?

Environmental Protection Agency officials and environmentalists say the Superfund program has been chronically underfinanced since a tax that supported it expired in 1995.

What is more, the old Vineland plant, like hundreds of other toxic dumps, is a so-called orphan site, meaning that either no responsible party has been found or money from the original polluter has been exhausted. So the taxpayer is on the hook for the remedial work. * * *

Until 1995, cleanups at orphan sites like Vineland were paid in part from a trust fund based on taxes from polluting industries. But that year, the Republican-run Congress, responding to industry complaints, refused to reauthorize the Superfund tax, which once collected hundreds of millions of dollars a year from chemical and oil companies.

President Obama wants to restore the tax and assumes it will provide $1 billion in revenues for his 2011 budget.

Until then, financing for work at the nation’s nearly 1,600 Superfund sites will come from taxpayers in the form of E.P.A. appropriations or stimulus money. The $600 million in stimulus money virtually doubles the amount available for Superfund work in the current fiscal year, officials said. * * *

E.P.A. officials said the agency continued to spend millions of dollars a year investigating Superfund polluters and forcing them to pay for their misdeeds. None of the stimulus money will go to lawyers to pursue recovery, they said, though the new money will allow the agency to use appropriations to pursue polluters.

Officials said the 50 sites receiving stimulus money were chosen because their cleanups had progressed considerably. The goal at most sites is to remove the toxins and to allow the property to return to productive or recreational use.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 26, 2009 05:34 PM
Posted to Environment