Bush Proposing to Shift Burden of Toxic Cleanups to Taxpayers
" Still, the taxes were reauthorized under President Ronald
Reagan and again under Mr. Bush's father. They expired
in 1995, and while President Bill Clinton sought to have
them reinstated, the House of Representatives, by then
under Republican control, refused."
The New York Times
February 24, 2002
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
W ASHINGTON, Feb. 23 -
Faced with dwindling
reserves in the huge account that
gave the Superfund waste
cleanup program its name, the
Bush administration has decided
to designate fewer sites for
restoration and to shift the bulk
of the costs from industry to
taxpayers.
The administration says it is
dealing with much bigger and
more complex sites, if fewer of
them, and that deciding how to
pay for the program is up to
Congress.
For years Congress has failed to
reach agreement on
reauthorizing the tax on industry
that used to be the source of
money for the Superfund, which was founded in 1980
under the slogan "the polluter pays."
The trust fund used the special corporate taxes to clean
up contamination at so-called orphan sites, or those
where the responsible party could not be identified or
could not pay, as well as for recalcitrant companies and
emergency action.
The trust fund has been used to clean up about 30
percent of the 1,551 sites on the Environmental
Protection Agency's national priority list, with
corporations themselves paying to clean up the other 70
percent. Most companies prefer to pay for their own
cleanup because they can do it for less than the
government, which is allowed to charge the companies
three times the cost, plus penalties.
But the trust fund is running out of money.
Under pressure from the chemical and oil industries,
Congress let the corporate taxes expire in 1995. Without
them, the trust fund dwindled, from a high of $3.8 billion
in 1996 to a projected $28 million next year.
President Bush did not reauthorize the taxes last year in
his first budget, and his proposed budget for 2003
explicitly states that he will not do so.
"The budget does not propose reauthorization of
Superfund taxes," the administration says in an obscure
section of the spending bill for Veterans Affairs, Housing
and Urban Development and independent agencies.
Chemical and oil companies and other businesses had
long complained that the taxes were burdensome, costing
them collectively $4 million a day or more than $1 billion
a year. They also complained that the Superfund program
was slow, overly stringent and badly managed and had
unfair liability rules.
Still, the taxes were reauthorized under President Ronald
Reagan and again under Mr. Bush's father. They expired
in 1995, and while President Bill Clinton sought to have
them reinstated, the House of Representatives, by then
under Republican control, refused.
The Bush administration's declaration that it will not
reauthorize the taxes will substantially shift the costs of
maintaining the Superfund trust fund to taxpayers.
In 1994, taxpayers paid $250 million for Superfund
cleanups, or about 21 percent of the $1.2 billion fund,
with corporate taxes paying $950 million, or about 79
percent.
Taxpayers paid $350 million in 1999, and since then have
paid about 50 percent of the cost. Mr. Bush proposes that
taxpayers pay $700 million, or more than 50 percent of
the $1.3 billion fund, in 2003.
The fund itself will provide about $600 million in 2003.
Even though the tax has not been collected since 1995,
the fund has reserves because the Environmental
Protection Agency has recovered costs from corporations
and collected interest. But that amount is vanishing. By
2004, all the money will come from taxpayers.
"This is shifting the burden to taxpayers, and it is
dramatically realigning the purpose of the program, which
was to ensure that polluters pay," said Grant Cope, a
lawyer with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
"Taxpayers are paying more, and fewer sites are being
cleaned up."
The lack of money is forcing agency officials to rethink
their priorities. In the last two years, the agency has cut
the overall number of sites it has designated for cleanup
and completed cleanup at fewer sites than it selected.
More than 80 were cleaned up in each of the last four
years of the Clinton administration, compared with 47 in
2001, Mr. Bush's first year in office, and 40 are projected
to be cleaned up this year and 40 next. The
administration had initially projected that it would finish
65 sites in 2001.
Marianne Horinko, assistant administrator of the agency's
Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, said that
fewer sites were being added, and fewer completed,
because the agency had largely finished the $20 million
"garden variety" sites on its list and was now taking on
huge, very difficult cases - "megasites" costing more than
$200 million.
This year, the agency has considered the addition of only
two sites, both of them large old mines and both of them
orphan sites, one in Montana and one in Nebraska.
"That's the future of the Superfund," Ms. Horinko said.
She said that Congress was happier with the program
than it had been in the past in part because it had
transformed itself from a "study, study, study program,"
with endless delays and litigation, to "a big construction
program, and the money goes right into the
communities."
Katherine Probst, a longtime expert on the Superfund
and a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, an
independent research group, said the drop was partly
because of less money being available for cleaning up
more complicated sites and partly because the Superfund
program "hasn't been efficiently and effectively managed."
Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, the top
Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee,
recently wrote to Christie Whitman, administrator of the
E.P.A., asking for an explanation by March 6 of "the
sudden slowdown."
"Has the administration made a policy decision to slow
down Superfund cleanups, contrary to your assurances to
us last May?" the letter asks. It also asks for details of
each project that the administration had initially
designated and no longer does.
The agency has not made that list public, but various
officials said they had been sending notices saying activity
would be delayed.
For example, Myron Knudson, director of the Superfund
division based in Dallas, said he had five sites ready to be
cleaned up by the trust fund but was not able to start
because he had no money.
"I have five sites ready to go tomorrow, but I'm sending out
letters saying there's no money at this time," Mr.
Knudson said.
Since the Superfund began, 1,551 sites have been put on
the national priority list, with 257 sites cleaned up and
552 mostly cleaned up, the E.P.A. said. At most of the
sites, groundwater contamination remains a problem that
will take years to remedy.
But money also remains a problem. A study by Ms.
Probst, financed by Congress, predicted that over the next
decade, 230 to 490 new Superfund sites could be added
to the E.P.A.'s priority list and would cost at least $14
billion.
Democrats in Congress say they intend to push the
administration to reconsider its refusal to reauthorize the
corporate taxes, though they have little expectation that it
will.
Representative Frank Pallone Jr., a Democrat whose New
Jersey district is home to one of the biggest
concentrations of Superfund sites in the nation, said, "The
problem is that the president is adamantly opposed to the
tax, and the Republican leadership is adamantly opposed
to it, so the chances of getting it through are very slim."
Mr. Pallone said the situation was complicated by the
tight budget. "The amount of money available for this will
be dramatically less," he said. He predicted that
ultimately, fewer sites would be cleaned up because the
administration would not reinstitute the tax and would
not allocate more taxpayer money from general revenues.
"I don't think this administration will appropriate enough
general revenue money to make up for the loss of the tax,"
he said.
A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency
said the agency was at the mercy of Congress.
"If Congress keeps the dollar amount at the same level,
we'll continue as we have been," said Joe Martyak, the
spokesman. "If Congress cuts it in half, we'll have only
half as much."
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