RETURN TO ‘POLLUTER PAYS’

What better place to start restoring the idea of corporate responsibility, thoroughly trashed on Wall Street of late, than with returning the “polluter pays” idea to the Superfund cleanup program? The absence of this mechanism already has slowed work at 33 highly contaminated hazardous waste sites nationwide and promises a significant tax shift to the general public if it is not reinstated.

The news of the work slowdown at the hazardous sites came from Demo-crats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who wanted to highlight the danger of allowing the fund, built up through levies on oil, chemical and heavy manufacturing industries,

to lapse, as expected next year. If it does, taxpayers will have to double the amount they currently contribute to

the $1.27 billion in annual funding or reduce the number of sites to be cleaned up. Given the thousands of communities that depend on the federal government to clean these sites so that their pollution does not spread and they can be reused, cutting back is not likely.

Maine currently has 13 Superfund sites. None of them were among the 33 highlighted in the report by the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency, but already work at the site of the former Eastland Woolen Mill in Corinna has been slowed because of a lack of federal funding.

The polluter-pays idea, begun in 1980, was killed in 1995 by congressional Republicans when they refused to reauthorize it. Businesses, understandably, were happy to see the levy die, but the need for remediation hasn’t gone away, so the next likely source of funding is the taxpaying public. Taxpayers regularly subsidize business costs – from low-interest loans and outright grants to tax breaks to paying the health care results of the tobacco industry – so there is precedent for taxpayers picking up this bill too.

But given the recent loss of confidence in some major corporations, whose executives over the last several years have placed the goal of inflating stock prices ahead of honesty and integrity, actually paying for the messes they have made could help improve their image, to say nothing of the matter of fairness. Republicans have resisted the Democrats’ insistence on polluter pays, as well as other regulatory costs to business, but it cannot be in the GOP’s interest to watch the stock market swoon while investors await unsavory revelations to emerge from the next blue-firm.

Polluter pays is one of many ways corporations recognize their responsibility to the public. With members of Congress pushing to get to the front of the line to condemn the recent business practices, the lobbies for oil and manufacturing, etc., could demonstrate that they too are concerned with these practices, that they understand they have obligations beyond those to their shareholders and that they are willing to put up funding to match their concerns. And if these industries don’t reach this conclusion on their own, Congress should reach it for them.