As Funds Dwindle, NH Toxic Waste Neighbors Fears Being Left to Pick up the Tab
WASHINGTON – The federal Superfund,, which for 20 years financed the cleanup of the worst toxic waste dumps in the country, will be flat broke by the end of the month, according to a recent report by congressional watchdogs, leaving uncertain the future of 18 poisonous sites in New Hampshire communities.
While Congress is on track to completely fund the program in the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1 by other means, lawmakers, government officials, environmental advocates and the sites’ neighbors disagree about whether the trust fund’s bankruptcy will slow or even end cleanups in New Hampshire.
If the cleanup work continues, it now will be financed by taxpayers. When Congress created the Superfund in 1980, it designed the law to force polluting industries to finance the cleanup of their own waste.
“I don’t think anybody who’s paying taxes in this country should be paying for what somebody else did on purpose – and that’s the operative word, on purpose,” said Gerard Lemay, 57, an independent air-conditioning repairman from Nashua, who for 20 years has lived on Gilson Road a half-mile from one of the nation’s first Superfund sites.
The Superfund was established in response to several environmental disasters, particularly at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, that sickened nearby residents in 1978. It was designed to bankroll the cleanup of the most severely polluted sites – known as the National Priority List – for which no polluters responsible for creating the problem could be found or forced to foot the bill.
For 15 years, a series of taxes on the chemical industry and on corporations in general financed the trust fund. The concept of taxing the chemical industry was simple: the polluter pays.
But in 1995, Congress allowed the taxes to expire amid fierce lobbying by the chemical industry. Since then, Congress voted down attempts to reinstate the tax, arguing that too much of the money went to litigation rather than cleanup.
For the past eight years, the Superfund continued to operate on the $3.6 billion balance left in its account in 1995 and additional money appropriated by Congress. But the trust fund’s reserves will dwindle to zero by Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year, according to a report released this month by the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm.
The Superfund will rely solely on the largess of Congress, raising concerns that cleanup efforts may languish or die at a time of war and record deficits and that thousands of New Hampshire residents will remain at risk.
“Eighty-seven billion we’re giving to Iraq áwhen we can’t even clean up our own hazardous waste sites,” said Nashua Alderman Marc Plamondon, who has fought to get the Mohawk Tannery site in Nashua on the priority list. Formerly operated by Granite State Leathers, the 30-acre site on the Nashua River’s floodplain – and adjacent to a children’s bicycle trail — is contaminated with chemical sludge, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Plamondon said he’s not sure Superfund is the answer anymore.
“We could list it, but we’re looking for other options because we know there’s no money,” Plamondon said. “If we do list it, then it falls into the black hole of Superfund sitesá and everybody just walks away and the EPA sits there waiting for money.”
He added, “The sense of the general population is a sense of utter frustration and helplessness.”
There are currently 1,233 sites from across the country on the National Priority List, including the 18 in New Hampshire. More than 200 additional sites nationwide – but none in New Hampshire — have been removed from the list because they were cleaned up sometime in the last 20 years.
“Communities that have Superfund sites in them will have to wait, period,” said Catherine Corkery, an organizer for the New Hampshire chapter of the Sierra Club, based in Concord. “Now, New Hampshire is left holding the toxic bag.”
The Bush administration, Corkery says, has made its priorities clear by becoming the first to openly oppose the collection or reinstatement of the taxes on polluters. The result, she said, is slower clean-ups, reluctance on the part of the EPA to add more sites to the list and a shifting of costs from polluters to taxpayers.
But EPA officials and New Hampshire legislators contend the cleanup effort has not been hurt for lack of a tax. EPA spokesman Dave Ryan said the Superfund trust fund is “not relevant and that the idea of a “polluter pays” system is and always has been a myth because corporations simply passed the tax along in the form of higher prices.
Ryan argued that since Congress appears prepared to give the Superfund slightly more money for next year than it did this year – a total of nearly $1.3 billion – the fact that the money is not coming from the trust fund is a “non-issue.”
“As far as we see it, we don’t need it,” Ryan said of the trust fund. “All that matters is how much Congress is going to give us.”
Ryan added that EPA statistics show polluters pay directly for cleanup at 70 percent of all Superfund sites. The trust fund finances the remaining 30 percent because the polluters responsible either could not or would not pay.
But a prominent public advocacy group says those statistics are deceptive. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an independent watchdog organization, reported recently that the Superfund’s cleanup progress has slowed as the majority of the costs have shifted to taxpayers. The report said taxpayers financed 79 percent of the cost of toxic cleanup this year, up from 18 percent in 1995. That number will reach 100 percent once the trust fund is empty at month’s end.
The report, based on EPA statistics and an independent review that the EPA commissioned, also shows that the number of sites cleaned up every year has dropped from an average of 87 in the late 1990s, to an average of 45 since President Bush took office in 2001. While the administration has attributed the drop-off as a sign that the EPA is undertaking more complex, time-consuming cleanup operations, U.S.PIRG blames funding shortfalls.
“It’s a policy decision by the EPA not to care where the funding is coming from,” said Julie Wolk, U.S.PIRG’s environmental health advocate and the report’s author. But she said the source of money makes a big difference. “Having a surplus in the fund actually gives the EPA the ability to crack down on these polluters and say, ‘You’d better go in and clean up that site or we’re going to go in and charge you,’ ” Wolk added. The Superfund statute allows the EPA to recoup as much as three times the cleanup costs plus fines from polluters that refuse to cooperate.
The report lists two of New Hampshire’s 18 Superfund sites that received either no or partial funding in 2002 and 2003, and projects that as many as eight current and proposed New Hampshire sites could be affected by future funding shortfalls.
Bradley said he’s willing to consider reinstating the taxes “provided there is legal reform.” He said too much of the fund’s money goes toward “endless litigation” over liability.
In the meantime, Bradley said, “the important thing to take away is that there has been money appropriated” for the Superfund to continue its cleanups after this year.
Bradley conceded that tighter funding could lead to a “stalling of progress” on sites that no longer pose a direct threat to human health but still are far from clean – such as the one on Gilson Road. The EPA’s estimates at least 1,300 drums of “chemical sludges” were illegally dumped on that site, formerly a sand pit whose owner charged manufacturers to dispose of hazardous waste there.
U.S. Congressman Charles Bass, R-NH, said he would support reinstating the taxes provided they’re accompanied by reform.
But Bass, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials, said that given the other major issues before Congress, such as war and Medicare reform, he’s “not even confident” the Superfund could be addressed in the next year.
Neither Bradley nor Bass co-sponsored a bill introduced early this year that would have reinstated the Superfund taxes, though both voted in favor of a failed amendment to increase Superfund funding by $115 million next year.
New Hampshire Sens. Judd Gregg and John E. Sununu, both Republicans, this year voted against an amendment to reinstate the taxes.
Gregg said in a statement that the Superfund remains “extremely important,” though bogged down by lawsuits. He vowed to continue to make sure New Hampshire communities receive Superfund money if they need it.
“Real reforms are needed in order to improve cleanup and cost-effectiveness,” Gregg said. “We must ensure that the Superfund is adequately funded and explore ways to ensure that the funds are used effectively.”
Sununu said in a statement that he supports a comprehensive reform of the program and pointed out that Congress has appropriated more than $3.8 billion to help cleanup hazardous waste sites in the last three years.
But for Prudy Piechota, who like Mr. Lemay has lived more than two decades near the Gilson Road site in Nashua, using taxpayer money to clean Superfund sites is outrageous.
“The reason [the] Superfund was established was because corporations were doing the wrong thing at the wrong time,” said Piechota, 55. In the early 1980s, Piechota led the fight to bring the EPA to Gilson Road and force polluters to pay cleanup costs, a fight that several neighbors said tore the community apart and escalated to threats and violence.
“All those people who died, all those people who got sick, and now who are they going to tax? Shame on them!” she said. “I’m just a housewifeá but I know enough that when I sweep dirt under the carpet, I have to go back and clean it later.”
