No matter how accommodating federal officials have been while trying to persuade Maine towns and businesses to agree to fund the cleanup of a waste site in Plymouth, those being asked to foot the bill inescapably will feel they are being penalized for mistakes made by the state decades ago. They’re right, which is why the state should have stepped in by now to agree to pay the costs its policies helped generate.

Under the state’s direction, car dealers, garages, school districts, 16 municipalities and others from 1965 to 1980 disposed of waste oil by sending it to the Portland-Bangor Waste Oil Co., which stored it in 1,000- to 2,000-gallon tanks at the How’s Corner site in Plymouth. In ’87, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection identified the site as the source of solvents that were leaching into nearby residential wells. The residences there have been since connected to clean water, but the question of who will pay the accumulated clean-up costs – currently at $8 million – has caused years of debate.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a track record of asking the contributors to the Superfund site to help pay for the cleanup. The site’s operator, George West Jr. of Wells, apparently doesn’t have resources to pay for the remediation, but Mr. West did have a detailed list of 517 people, businesses or communities that he had collected oil from and who, from the EPA’s standpoint, could be held culpable. The settlement fees range from $848 for SAD 34 to $285,000 for General Electric Co. Most are in the $10,000 to $40,000 range.

Even if the EPA collected these fees from all responsible parties, which it likely will not – two days before the agreement deadline of Sept. 22, for instance, Greenville selectmen opted not to pay – the money still would not reach the level the federal agency estimates it will need. As it had during other Superfund negotiations, the EPA offered the potentially responsible parties a deal. Sign the consent decree, offering to pay your share, it said, and you don’t have to pay the so-called orphan share, which is the amount that cannot be collected from either defunct or struggling businesses, you’ll be protected from lawsuits from either the federal government or other businesses that have signed on, and you may qualify for a hardship waiver to further reduce your cost.

It’s not a bad deal given the alternative – a potential Department of Justice suit, further legal entanglements from the businesses that agreed to pay but want to see more potentially responsible parties (PRP) writing checks and no reduction in the orphan share, which totals several million dollars. But when a similar site in Wells was identified under Maine’s “uncontrolled sites law,” the state equivalent of the Superfund program, the state stepped forward to help out financially.

It should do the same in Plymouth. The towns and businesses that contributed to waste oil at this site were following the rules and meeting environmental standards of the day. If the state wants them to continue to place trust in current regulations, it needs to demonstrate that today’s rules won’t be the source of fines in the future. It can do that by agreeing to pay the costs at How’s Corner.