[1483] in peace2
Bush Proposing to Shift Burden of Toxic Cleanups to Taxpayers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Saurabh Asthana)
Sun Feb 24 10:24:25 2002
Message-Id: <200202241518.g1OFI6v14624@chaos11.bwh.harvard.edu>
To: peace-list@mit.edu
Reply-to: rednblack@alum.mit.edu
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 10:18:05 -0500
From: Saurabh Asthana <angrymob@chaos11.bwh.harvard.edu>
The only words that can express my frustration are very dirty words. Read this
and weep.
Saurabh
------
"Everywhere the building of a prison is the first step in the organization of
a civilized state." - B. Traven, 'Government'
February 24, 2002
NY Times
Bush Proposing to Shift Burden of Toxic Cleanups to Taxpayers
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
[W] ASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — Faced with dwindling reserves in the huge account
that gave the Superfund waste cleanup program its name, the Bush administration
has decided to designate fewer sites for restoration and to shift the bulk of
the costs from industry to taxpayers.
The administration says it is dealing with much bigger and more complex sites,
if fewer of them, and that deciding how to pay for the program is up to
Congress.
For years Congress has failed to reach agreement on reauthorizing the tax on
industry that used to be the source of money for the Superfund, which was
founded in 1980 under the slogan "the polluter pays."
The trust fund used the special corporate taxes to clean up contamination at
so-called orphan sites, or those where the responsible party could not be
identified or could not pay, as well as for recalcitrant companies and
emergency action.
The trust fund has been used to clean up about 30 percent of the 1,551 sites on
the Environmental Protection Agency's national priority list, with corporations
themselves paying to clean up the other 70 percent. Most companies prefer to
pay for their own cleanup because they can do it for less than the government,
which is allowed to charge the companies three times the cost, plus penalties.
But the trust fund is running out of money.
Under pressure from the chemical and oil industries, Congress let the corporate
taxes expire in 1995. Without them, the trust fund dwindled, from a high of
$3.8 billion in 1996 to a projected $28 million next year.
President Bush did not reauthorize the taxes last year in his first budget, and
his proposed budget for 2003 explicitly states that he will not do so.
"The budget does not propose reauthorization of Superfund taxes," the
administration says in an obscure section of the spending bill for Veterans
Affairs, Housing and Urban Development and independent agencies.
Chemical and oil companies and other businesses had long complained that the
taxes were burdensome, costing them collectively $4 million a day or more than
$1 billion a year. They also complained that the Superfund program was slow,
overly stringent and badly managed and had unfair liability rules.
Still, the taxes were reauthorized under President Ronald Reagan and again
under Mr. Bush's father. They expired in 1995, and while President Bill Clinton
sought to have them reinstated, the House of Representatives, by then under
Republican control, refused.
The Bush administration's declaration that it will not reauthorize the taxes
will substantially shift the costs of maintaining the Superfund trust fund to
taxpayers.
In 1994, taxpayers paid $250 million for Superfund cleanups, or about 21
percent of the $1.2 billion fund, with corporate taxes paying $950 million, or
about 79 percent.
Taxpayers paid $350 million in 1999, and since then have paid about 50 percent
of the cost. Mr. Bush proposes that taxpayers pay $700 million, or more than 50
percent of the $1.3 billion fund, in 2003.
The fund itself will provide about $600 million in 2003. Even though the tax
has not been collected since 1995, the fund has reserves because the
Environmental Protection Agency has recovered costs from corporations and
collected interest. But that amount is vanishing. By 2004, all the money will
come from taxpayers.
"This is shifting the burden to taxpayers, and it is dramatically realigning
the purpose of the program, which was to ensure that polluters pay," said Grant
Cope, a lawyer with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "Taxpayers are
paying more, and fewer sites are being cleaned up."
The lack of money is forcing agency officials to rethink their priorities. In
the last two years, the agency has cut the overall number of sites it has
designated for cleanup and completed cleanup at fewer sites than it selected.
More than 80 were cleaned up in each of the last four years of the Clinton
administration, compared with 47 in 2001, Mr. Bush's first year in office, and
40 are projected to be cleaned up this year and 40 next. The administration had
initially projected that it would finish 65 sites in 2001.
Marianne Horinko, assistant administrator of the agency's Office of Solid Waste
and Emergency Response, said that fewer sites were being added, and fewer
completed, because the agency had largely finished the $20 million "garden
variety" sites on its list and was now taking on huge, very difficult cases —
"megasites" costing more than $200 million.
This year, the agency has considered the addition of only two sites, both of
them large old mines and both of them orphan sites, one in Montana and one in
Nebraska.
"That's the future of the Superfund," Ms. Horinko said.
She said that Congress was happier with the program than it had been in the
past in part because it had transformed itself from a "study, study, study
program," with endless delays and litigation, to "a big construction program,
and the money goes right into the communities."
Katherine Probst, a longtime expert on the Superfund and a senior fellow at
Resources for the Future, an independent research group, said the drop was
partly because of less money being available for cleaning up more complicated
sites and partly because the Superfund program "hasn't been efficiently and
effectively managed."
Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Energy and
Commerce Committee, recently wrote to Christie Whitman, administrator of the
E.P.A., asking for an explanation by March 6 of "the sudden slowdown."
"Has the administration made a policy decision to slow down Superfund cleanups,
contrary to your assurances to us last May?" the letter asks. It also asks for
details of each project that the administration had initially designated and no
longer does.
The agency has not made that list public, but various officials said they had
been sending notices saying activity would be delayed.
For example, Myron Knudson, director of the Superfund division based in Dallas,
said he had five sites ready to be cleaned up by the trust fund but was not
able to start because he had no money.
"I have five sites ready to go tomorrow, but I'm sending out letters saying
there's no money at this time," Mr. Knudson said.
Since the Superfund began, 1,551 sites have been put on the national priority
list, with 257 sites cleaned up and 552 mostly cleaned up, the E.P.A. said. At
most of the sites, groundwater contamination remains a problem that will take
years to remedy.
But money also remains a problem. A study by Ms. Probst, financed by Congress,
predicted that over the next decade, 230 to 490 new Superfund sites could be
added to the E.P.A.'s priority list and would cost at least $14 billion.
Democrats in Congress say they intend to push the administration to reconsider
its refusal to reauthorize the corporate taxes, though they have little
expectation that it will.
Representative Frank Pallone Jr., a Democrat whose New Jersey district is home
to one of the biggest concentrations of Superfund sites in the nation, said,
"The problem is that the president is adamantly opposed to the tax, and the
Republican leadership is adamantly opposed to it, so the chances of getting it
through are very slim."
Mr. Pallone said the situation was complicated by the tight budget. "The amount
of money available for this will be dramatically less," he said. He predicted
that ultimately, fewer sites would be cleaned up because the administration
would not reinstitute the tax and would not allocate more taxpayer money from
general revenues.
"I don't think this administration will appropriate enough general revenue
money to make up for the loss of the tax," he said.
A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency said the agency was at the
mercy of Congress.
"If Congress keeps the dollar amount at the same level, we'll continue as we
have been," said Joe Martyak, the spokesman. "If Congress cuts it in half,
we'll have only half as much."
