Article date: July 10, 2001

By Eric Planin

The federal Superfund program has begun to pay dividends after more than two decades of controversy and uneven performance, with more than half of the nation’s worst toxic waste dumps either cleaned up or no longer posing threats, according to a new study.

Yet the number of toxic or hazardous sites requiring federal attention continues to grow, and congress will have to spend at least $14 billion to $16 billion over the coming decade just to keep pace with the problem. The study, prepared by the policy think tank Resources for the Future and released yesterday, was commissioned by Congress as part of a reassessment of the Environmental Protection Agency program and its long term costs.

Until recently, the Superfund program was sharply criticized by state officials, industrial leaders and conservative Republicans for the slow pace of its cleanups, the amount of red tape involved, and the size of penalties assessed against business and industrial polluters to help offset the government’s cleanup costs. Now, however, a number of the EPA’s critics— including the General Accounting Office — have lauded the more recent successes of the program.

As of late last year, according to the study, about 57 percent of the more than 1,280 toxic waste dumps on the EPA’s national priority list— other than polluted federal or military property — had been designated "construction complete" or free of any immediate threats to humans.

However, the cleanup list is expected to grow by as many as 50 sites each year in the coming decade, according to the study. And it remains unclear whether Congress intends to continue to fully fund the program.

Superfund has been controversial virtually from the time it was created. As conceived by Democrats in 1980, the program provided the EPA with the legal and financial tools to clean up the nation’s worst toxic waste dumps. Under the program, costs that the government couldn’t directly assign to polluters were covered by a federal trust fund financed by taxes imposed on industries assumed to contribute to the pollution, such as oil, gas, and chemical companies.

During the Regan administration, Rep. John D. Dingell (Mich.) and other congressional Democrats attacked the EPA for hamstringing the program. When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, they promised to finally overhaul Superfund, to free businesses and innocent parties from the seemingly endless rounds of litigation that sprouted from Superfund liability provisions. The Clinton administration initially pledged its support for change, but the effort stalled. Interest in reshaping the program was revived by a string of well publicized Superfund horror stories.

Former Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.) vowed to make revamping the Superfund program a top priority but pressure to pass new legislation diminished after the EPA instituted its own set of reforms in a bid to make the program more fair to businesses and more efficient.

The corporate taxes that financed Superfund cleanups expired at the end of 1995, which left the program with a substantial trust fund but no annual stream of revenue. Eventually, this make it increasingly dependent on annual appropriations from Congress.

The government spends about $1.54 billion a year to operate the Superfund program, and Congress would need to continue spending at roughly that level in the coming decade to sustain the program at current levels. According to the Resources for the Future study, state sponsored Superfund programs lack sufficient financial resources to assume the cost of major federal cleanups.

Neither the Bush administration nor congressional leaders have proposed to either reinstated the taxes or undertake comprehensive change in of the Superfund program, which likely would trigger efforts by conservative critics to gut the legislation.

Instead, Congress is attempting to complete work this year on revisions to a subsidiary of the Superfund program, which would provide more funding and legal incentives for states to clean up 500,000 abandoned industrial sites known as brownfields. The Senate approved brownfields legislation April 25 by a vote of 99 to 0, and the House is considering its own version of the bill.

"Currently, a wary truce exists between those who would leave (Superfund) liability and cleanup provisions intact and those who do not want to reinstitute the authority for the taxes that filled the coffers of the trust fund," the study concluded.

Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), a conservative GOP leader, agreed with that assessment last week. Speaking about the reauthorization of the Superfund program, he said, " I don’t see the time or the politics to allow it this year. Given the stalemate, we will probably work on it piece by piece."