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Can Superfund Continue To Protect Public Health? How the Bush Administration Has Slowed the Pace of Cleanup at the Nation’s Worst Toxic Waste Sites 2002-04-12 Superfund_Report_4-02.pdf News Release

Executive Summary

As the new home of NJPIRG's environmental work, Environment New Jersey can be contacted regarding this report.

Superfund is the nation’s preeminent law for cleaning up the country’s most contaminated toxic waste sites. Superfund makes polluters pay to clean up contamination in two ways. First, Superfund makes polluters pay to clean up their contaminated sites. Second, Superfund taxes polluting industries. These “polluters pay” taxes ideally provide enough money to build a surplus that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses to clean up sites when the agency cannot locate the polluters, the polluters have gone bankrupt, or when they refuse to undertake clean up activities.

EPA has steadily increased the pace of cleanups, to a peak of 86 cleanups a year during the middle and late 1990s. However, the Bush administration has dramatically decreased the pace of cleanups by more than 50 percent in two years. Not coincidentally, the administration also has under-funded the program by at least $1 to $1.4 billion from 2001 to 2003.

From coast to coast, EPA has been unable clean up Superfund sites. The media has reported that as many as 32 sites across the country could remain contaminated rather than being cleaned up this year. The New York Times quoted EPA’s lead Superfund official in Region 6, which covers Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas, as saying that the agency did not have the money to move forward with cleaning up five sites in his region alone. ABC News aired a story on March 21 that highlighted the Chemical Insecticide Corp. Superfund site in Edison, New Jersey, which EPA said it could not clean up despite years of studies and a community that is urging EPA to move forward. In the state of Washington, EPA has told a community that the agency cannot conduct a human health risk assessment at the Midnite Mine Superfund site that is contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive material.

If Superfund is founded on the “polluter pays” principle, why has the administration under-funded the program? Since Superfund was created, every administration has collected and supported reauthorization of Superfund’s polluter pays taxes. Unfortunately, the polluter pays taxes expired in 1995, when Superfund had more than $3 billion in surplus money. In 2003, the fund will dwindle to only $28 million. Nevertheless, the Bush administration opposes reauthoriza-tion of Superfund’s taxes, taking a position that is contrary to former Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton, who all collected and supported reauthorization of the taxes.

While under-funding the program and opposing the polluter pays taxes, the administration has increased the amount that taxpayers contribute to cover the cost of cleanups: from $634 million in 2001 and $635 million in 2002, to a proposed $700 million in 2003. The administration’s policies mark a dramatic reversal of the standards that have guided the clean up of toxic waste sites in this country for more than twenty years. The Bush administration is making taxpayers pay more and asking polluters to pay less, while cleaning up fewer of the nation’s worst toxic waste sites.

PIRG analyzed 671 Superfund sites (representing 55 percent of all sites) in 17 states to determine which sites could be affected by the administration’s under-funding of the Superfund program. This snapshot found that 255 Superfund sites in these states may be subject to a delayed cleanup or less stringent EPA oversight of clean up activities 6 being conducted by polluters. The longer these sites remain polluted, the greater the potential threat to the health of neighboring communities.

Unfortunately, EPA has refused to divulge information pertaining to which Superfund sites could be affected by the administrative slowdown. As a result, this report can only project, not confirm, which sites will remain polluted longer or fall under lax EPA oversight. EPA is the only organization that can give the public this information. Citizens have a right-to-know whether sites in their community will be affected; EPA should quickly respond to public requests for such information.

One compelling reason to ensure this right-to-know is that Superfund sites threaten public health of nearby communities. One in four people in America lives within four miles of a Superfund site. Eighty-five percent of all Superfund sites have contaminated groundwater. Fifty percent of the U.S. population, and almost all residents in many rural areas, rely on groundwater for drinking water. Children born to parents living within one-quarter mile of a toxic waste site are at greater risk of suffering birth defects.

Policy Recommendations

• To ensure that people know if Superfund sites in their community will be affected by the Bush administration's recent shift in policy, we urge the administration to tell the public which sites will be affected by a lack of funding.
• In order for EPA to expeditiously clean up the nation's most heavily contaminated toxic waste sites, we urge the administration to support the reauthorization of Superfund's polluter pays taxes.
• To maintain our nation's belief in making polluters pays, and to retain the benefits to public health and environmental quality that flow from this principle, we urge the Bush administration to reduce the amount of money it takes from taxpayers to fund cleanups.