Since the Superfund was created in 1980 in reaction to the Love Canal disaster, the law of the land regarding toxic waste has been “the polluter pays.” If the parties directly responsible for an environmental disaster could not be identified or could not pay for the cleanup, the Superfund, a trust created by special taxes placed upon oil and chemical companies, was used. Taxpayers were dunned only to a small degree and only as a last resort.

Congress suspended collecting the special oil and chemical tax in 1995, when the Superfund was overflowing at $3.8 billion. That suspension, supposedly temporary until cleanups caught up with the cash surplus on hand, was never lifted and now, with the Superfund down to a scant $28 million, the Bush administration proposes eliminating the tax entirely.

If so, this will be a tax shift of unprecedented proportions and unconscionable effect. In 1994, the corporate taxes covered nearly 80 percent of Superfund cleanups, about $950 million, with taxpayers covering the rest. In 2003, taxpayers will pay $700 million, more than half of the total. In 2004, the payer of last resort will be the only resort.

This shift is utterly contrary to the Superfund law. It betrays the relief from liability the petroleum industry was granted when the law was passed. It ignores the intent of the 1995 suspension, which was supposed to last only until the fund was drawn down to $1.3 billion, an amount that matched the Environmental Protection Agency’s manpower resources to undertake cleanups.

This gutting of the Superfund also removes an important tool that compelled industries to avoid contamination and, if not, to clean up after themselves. When responsible parties refused to conduct their own cleanups, the EPA would do it with Superfund money and recover the cost, with additional penalties, from the responsible parties later.

The EPA has been able to sustain its cleanup program since the 1995 suspension through those recovered costs, penalties and interest. In the last two years, however, the agency has had to cut the number of sites designated for cleanup. More than 80 sites were cleaned up during the last four years of the Clinton administration. That dropped to 47 last year, down from an initial projection by the Bush administration of 65, and only 40 are planned this year and next. At least those are the initial projections.

Although the Superfund program got off to a slow start, often criticized by both industry and environmental groups for delay and ineffectiveness, reforms enacted during the ’90s resulted in a significantly quicker, more cost-effective and efficient process, improvements that allowed EPA to mount its important brownfields program that turned less-contaminated sites into productive land. There are many reasons the Superfund should be replenished. There simply is no reason the polluter should not pay.