Corinna doesn’t have a downtown anymore. Its historic village center has been transformed to a Superfund site.

Buildings have been razed, roads have been moved and residents have adjusted to the thousands of tons of contaminated soil piled beneath large plastic canopies.

The town’s 2,100 residents realize the Bush administration does not support putting more corporate money into the federal Superfund program, so sites like this one, where the old Eastland Woolen Mill once stood, can be made safe.

The residents also realize that without sufficient funding, the massive project, which began in 1995, will last several more years. So they make plans and go about their lives, taking detours.

“It will just take us that much longer to regain our village,” said Town Manager Judy Doore. “We’re planning, planning, planning, and we’re going to implement our plans as soon as the [Environmental Protection Agency] is out of there – we’re right on their heels.”

But Corinna angers environmentalists.

“There is no more Main Street, there’s just this big crater,” said Mathew Davis, an environmental and public health advocate for the Public Interest Research Group based in Boston.

PIRG is among several groups advocating a return to the “polluter pays tax” – a means of funding environmental cleanup projects by taxing all businesses that use toxic chemicals, not just those that pollute particular sites. When the tax expired in 1995, the Superfund exceeded $3 billion. Today, without a source of income, the pot has dwindled to $25 million.

The EPA estimates the money will be gone by 2004.

In the meantime, taxpayers are taking up the slack. In 1995, federal tax money contributed only 18 percent of the money – about $250 million – spent on Superfund projects nationwide. In recent years, that percentage has been on the rise – $635 million last year and a proposed $700 million for next year, which would make up 54 percent of the funding.

“You and I shouldn’t be the ones to clean up the [chemicals] in someone’s well,” Davis said. “In our society, it’s always about where the dollar falls.”

Hopeful beginnings

Superfund was created in 1980, near the height of the environmental movement. Ecological disasters like Love Canal – a working class neighborhood in upstate New York where dozens of homes and an elementary school were built directly atop a chemical dump – sparked public demand that somebody take responsibility for corporate pollution.

Under the new law, “potentially responsible parties” were to pay for cleaning up the environmental messes they caused.

However, environmental regulators soon discovered the astronomical cost of cleaning up America’s industrial legacy. Superfund was about old pollution, and in many cases the responsible parties had gone out of business years or decades earlier, according to Mark Hyland, who handles Superfund issues for the state Department of Environmental Protection.

“Back then [when most of the pollution occurred], we didn’t have any environmental laws at all,” he said. “Superfund is the court of last resort.”

To boost the overburdened program, then-President Reagan signed a 1986 law creating a source of funding for the new program: the polluter pays tax. This multibillion-dollar fund provided money to clean up “orphan sites,” contaminated areas or portions of areas for which no responsible party could be identified.

“That’s when the money really started rolling in, and things got going,” Davis said.

Boom and bust

Most of Maine’s 13 active sites (see graphic) were added to the National Priority List during Superfund’s heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To date, more than $520 million has been spent cleaning up sites around Maine.

Nationwide, Superfund has succeeded in cleaning up and delisting more than 800 sites. In Maine, only the Saco Tannery Waste Pits has achieved that status.

More than 400 sites remain on the ever-growing national list. In Maine, a new site in Brooksville was added a few months ago.

The Bush administration touts the progress being made in difficult economic times, completing the cleanups of 47 sites in 2001. EPA administrator Christie Whitman has frequently called the cleanup of existing Superfund sites a priority for her agency.

In the 1990s, however, the EPA averaged 80 or more cleanups a year, environmentalists argue.

President Bush has said he opposes reinstating the polluter pays tax, which a Republican-controlled Congress chose not to reauthorize in 1995, despite some effort by then-President Clinton on the program’s behalf.

Bush and Whitman both maintain that the polluter pays tax is unfair because it is not linked to a company’s actual environmental record. Everyone who used toxic chemicals was required to pay, regardless of whether they caused the pollution.

While the debate continues, the shrinking fund requires that budgets for some Superfund projects be reduced. An EPA report released in October finds that of the 81 Superfund sites requesting money during the 2002 fiscal year, 55 got less than what they had asked for; 20 got no funding at all.

Cleaning up Maine

Three of the most active Maine sites received less money than requested last year – the Eastland Woolen Mill in Corinna, Hows Corner in Plymouth, and O’Connor Co. in Augusta. The state’s newest site, Callahan Mine in Brooksville, was listed in September, but it has yet to appear in the Superfund budget.

The biggest loser, Corinna, which needed $12 million last year, received only $5 million. Its 2003 budget also is expected to be reduced. Because the Eastland Woolen Mill is the only orphan site in Maine that lost funding, its financial situation is of particular concern.

In Corinna, soil decontamination continues, the cleanup of groundwater and river contamination is beginning, but the fund could run dry before work on the project is finished.

Even sites like those in Plymouth and Augusta, for which responsible parties have been found, often require an interim outlay of public money to guarantee the public’s health and safety.

“We need the money at a certain time for things to happen,” Hyland said. “Often, Superfund is able to recoup only a few cents on the dollar [from the parties responsible for the pollution].”

For example, both Corinna and Plymouth required the immediate construction of expensive water systems that may have to be subsidized by Superfund or the state forever, he said.

Complicating the situation, Washington is sending the message that new orphan sites should not be proposed, in an effort to preserve what’s left of the Superfund.

“They don’t expect us to list any more sites for the next couple of years,” Hyland said. “Imagine the position it puts states in.”

Maine has its own toxic pollution program, which has cleaned up 69 smaller sites in the past two decades, and is working on more than 90 others.

But a typical Superfund site in Maine costs between $50 million and $100 million to clean up. Unprecedented environmental problems requiring experimental technologies, and tremendous legal costs, place most of the Superfund orphan sites far beyond DEP’s budget.

“The state of Maine just doesn’t have that kind of resources,” Hyland said. “If there are more out there, I don’t know what we’ll do with these sites.”

Superfund reform

Last year, a bipartisan coalition of 27 U.S. senators signed a letter to the EPA asking that the polluter pays tax be reinstated. Neither of Maine’s Republican senators participated, however.

When asked about Superfund, spokespeople for both Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins professed “strong support” for the popular program, but joined Bush in calling for “Superfund reform.”

In its next session, Congress will likely reauthorize the 1980 Superfund law. Critics of the program have demanded that concerns about the identification of potentially responsible parties be addressed in a new version of the law.

“You need to look at the Superfund program in its totality. There have been breakdowns in the way that the federal government and the EPA used [Superfund] in the past,” said Dave Lackey, a Snowe spokesman.

Lackey cited Maine’s Hows Corner site in Plymouth, where hundreds of people who disposed of waste oil at a state-approved location have been asked to pay a share of the cleanup.

“It’s not fair. These people did nothing wrong. There needs to be a balance achieved,” Lackey said.

Hyland disagrees, saying Superfund works well.

“It pulls in all the parties, but that sometimes has unintended consequences,” he said. People who cannot afford to pay are often excused from their responsibility, he said. In fact, more than 50 people have benefited from this provision at Hows Corner.

“The early sites were all Texaco and Chevron and General Electric – nobody felt bad when they had to pay,” Hyland said. “I’m sympathetic to their plight [the people who have been billed for Hows Corner], but at the same time, they’re no different than the big guys.”

While groups like the Sierra Club and PIRG are advocating the tax be restored, the future of Superfund is uncertain. The public outrage that was the impetus for the program 22 years ago just doesn’t exist today, Davis said.

“It’s been around so long that it’s somehow not as hot a topic as it should be,” he said. “The toxic waste is still out there.”