Back in the early ’50s, George West of Ogunquit was a young man with a plan: The post-war economy was booming; the nation was car-crazy; Maine was among the craziest. That meant a lot of motor oil, a lot of oil changes, a lot of waste oil.

Why waste it, West asked. Why not take it from the producers — car dealers, garages, municipalities, state and federal agencies — for a fee, store it, develop markets for it and sell it to be used again. Sure beats dumping it in the woods or in a stream or down the storm drain. West was recycling before recycling was cool.

So, with full approval and encouragement from the state, West and a couple of Massachusetts partners plunked down $100 to buy an old gravel pit in Wells, right next to the turnpike. The Portland-Bangor Waste Oil Services Company was in business.

Business was good. Not spectacular, but good. West got two cents a gallon for the waste oil he took in, some modest markets developed. Towns used it to control dust on dirt roads, paper companies burned it in their boilers, greenhouses used it to keep their plants warm. The flow of used oil grew, so transfer stations were opened in Casco, Plymouth and Ellsworth.

There were no laws regarding the storage or handling of waste oil at the time, but West did the best he could to be responsible. When oil from the saturated Wells facility began seeping onto the turnpike, West followed the advice of the Maine Water Improvement Commission and built earthen dikes to contain it.

From the time he opened in 1952 until he closed in 1980, West had more than 4,000 customers supplying him with waste oil: car dealers, garages, manufacturers, boat yards, aircraft maintenance companies, towns, cities, school departments, the state police, the state transportation department, the department of defense; anyone with vehicles, small engines or machinery to lubricate.

From the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, years after West was out of business, many new environmental laws were enacted, including laws pertaining to waste oil. The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection looked at the four Portland-Bangor sites and declared them contaminated. The price tag could run as high as $60 million and those who supplied the oil must pay.

Rather, most who supplied. About one-third of West’s customers no longer exist, so those orphaned costs are to be spread among those who remain — and among those who unwittingly bought contributing businesses after the fact. The large suppliers, including the City of Bangor, each are liable for $100,000 or more. In the Bangor region alone, there are about 20 retirees, former mom-and-pop station owners, who may have to pay $10,000 to $15,000 for their share — for psying to have something disposed of properly, for not dumping their waste oil in the woods. They played by the rules in effect at the time. The rules changed. Tough luck.

Plan B

There another, fairer, way to handle this unintended calamity. It’s L.D. 1626, An Act to Establish the Waste Motor Oil Disposal Site Remediation Program. It calls for the issuance of revenue bonds to get these messes cleaned up as quickly as possible, certainly quicker than dunning some 3,000 suppliers, with the bonds repaid from a user fee on new motor oil. About 14 cents a quart will cover it, roughly $1 per oil change. The feds — Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Brunswick Naval Air Station — will pay their own share.

For a precedent, the Legislature need look no further than tires. For decades used tires piled up around the state, millions of them. When it can time to tear down these mountains of rubber, lawmakers did not try to chase down everyone who had bought a tire in the last 50 years. It enacted a user fee, $1 per new tire purchased, to establish a fund to pay for the cleanup. It spreads the cost out over the entire population that contributes to the problem, its low costs harms no one, it compels tire dealers to dispose of old tires properly, it keep old tires from being dumped along the roadside. The parallel with waste oil is inescapable.

The federal and state regulations on assigning responsibility for environmental contamination are complex, but the underlying assumption is that the costs of cleaning up pollution should be borne by those who created the pollution. But what if it wasn’t considered pollution at the time it was created? What if what was then legal and responsible then is deemed illegal and irresponsible years later?

While the Legislature ponders those questions, here’s another: There are nearly 3,000 former Portland-Bangor customers on the hook for the offense of paying two cents a gallon to have their waste oil disposed of properly. They can be identified because George West kept very thorough business records. There are no records of those who saved the two cents and dumped into a stream. If the only way to avoid liability is to be sneaky and irresponsible, a vote against L.D. 1626 will be a vote for midnight dumping.

And George West? He’s an old man now. He’s broke. He lives in an old trailer on an oily patch of land next to the oil-sodden Wells facility, which the town of Wells now owns for nonpayment of taxes. He tried to do the right thing; it just turned out badly. Just like his customers.