RE-FUNDING SUPERFUND

The best reason for renewing the Superfund trust fund is no farther away than Plymouth, where a 15-year attempt to clean up an old oil waste site has led to lengthy, costly negotiations to recover cleanup costs from hundreds of businesses and organizations in Maine. The Senate today is expected to vote on an amendment to create a more certain flow of cash to Superfund, which is now relying entirely on general revenues. Maine’s senators should support the measure to relieve the burden on these businesses and make Superfund a more effective program.

Superfund, created in 1980, established three ways to pay for the cost of cleaning up polluted sites. If the company causing the pollution was still in business, it would pay. If the company could not, then the Environmental Protection Agency would clean it up and look for other parties who contributed to the pollution to recoup some or all of the money. Where neither of these options existed, a trust fund, paid by oil, chemical and related industries, would pay for what became known as the “orphan share.” Collections for that trust fund expired in 1995 and have not been reauthorized. Without it, general tax funds rather than what are essentially user fees have increasingly been put toward cleanups even as the total available money has diminished. The trust fund itself was expected to run out of money this year.

An amendment to the budget resolution before the Senate would create a revenue stream, presumably to be filled by the previous trust-fund sources, to help reduce the Superfund’s 1,234 sites on the EPA’s priority toxic-waste list. Getting the language in the resolution is important because it provides an opportunity later for Congress to budget cleanup funds and reverse the trend of the nation working on fewer and fewer new sites.

Hows Corner in Plymouth is hardly a new site but it is an important one. From 1965 to 1980, the Portland-Bangor Waste Oil Co. accepted waste oil and, apparently, solvents there that were later found to have leached into nearby residential wells. The lack of rules at the time meant that neither the waste-oil company nor the businesses and municipalities that contributed oil to the site broke any laws, but the polluted ground remains a toxic threat.

Several years ago, the EPA removed 850 tons of soil from the site and built new water supply systems for homes in the area and more engineering design work is being done now in preparation for a final remedy. However, the Portland-Bangor business is long closed, many of the contributing businesses are gone and finding the people who had their oil changed at various gas stations 25 years ago is impossible. This leaves a five-page list of businesses or communities from whom the site owner had collected oil, with costs ranging from several hundred to tens of thousands. They, understandably, are reluctant to pay, and in some cases cannot pay, for doing nothing wrong.

EPA needs funding and direction from the Senate to fund places such as Hows Corner, to accept a larger share of the costs of cleaning up this site and others like it. With so little money available through general revenues, re-creating the trust fund payments is a reasonable way to keep this important cleanup program moving.