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Executive Summary
As the new home of Illinois PIRG's environmental work,
Environment Illinois can be contacted with any questions regarding this report.
Superfund is the nation’s
preeminent law for cleaning up the country’s most contaminated toxic waste sites.
Superfund makes polluters pay to clean up contamination in two ways. First,
Superfund makes polluters pay to clean up their contaminated sites. Second,
Superfund taxes polluting industries. These “polluters pay” taxes ideally provide
enough money to build a surplus that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
uses to clean up sites when the agency cannot locate the polluters, the polluters
have gone bankrupt, or when they refuse to undertake clean up activities.
EPA has steadily increased
the pace of cleanups, to a peak of 86 cleanups a year during the middle and
late 1990s. However, the Bush administration has dramatically decreased the
pace of cleanups by more than 50 percent in two years. Not coincidentally, the
administration also has under-funded the program by at least $1 to $1.4 billion
from 2001 to 2003.
From coast to coast, EPA
has been unable clean up Superfund sites. The media has reported that as many
as 32 sites across the country could remain contaminated rather than being cleaned
up this year. The New York Times quoted EPA’s lead Superfund official in Region
6, which covers Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas, as saying
that the agency did not have the money to move forward with cleaning up five
sites in his region alone. ABC News aired a story on March 21 that highlighted
the Chemical Insecticide Corp. Superfund site in Edison, New Jersey, which EPA
said it could not clean up despite years of studies and a community that is
urging EPA to move forward. In the state of Washington, EPA has told a community
that the agency cannot conduct a human health risk assessment at the Midnite
Mine Superfund site that is contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive material.
If Superfund is founded
on the “polluter pays” principle, why has the administration under-funded the
program? Since Superfund was created, every administration has collected and
supported reauthorization of Superfund’s polluter pays taxes. Unfortunately,
the polluter pays taxes expired in 1995, when Superfund had more than $3 billion
in surplus money. In 2003, the fund will dwindle to only $28 million. Nevertheless,
the Bush administration opposes reauthoriza-tion of Superfund’s taxes, taking
a position that is contrary to former Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and
Clinton, who all collected and supported reauthorization of the taxes.
While under-funding the
program and opposing the polluter pays taxes, the administration has increased
the amount that taxpayers contribute to cover the cost of cleanups: from $634
million in 2001 and $635 million in 2002, to a proposed $700 million in 2003.
The administration’s policies mark a dramatic reversal of the standards that
have guided the clean up of toxic waste sites in this country for more than
twenty years. The Bush administration is making taxpayers pay more and asking
polluters to pay less, while cleaning up fewer of the nation’s worst toxic waste
sites.
PIRG analyzed 671 Superfund
sites (representing 55 percent of all sites) in 17 states to determine which
sites could be affected by the administration’s under-funding of the Superfund
program. This snapshot found that 255 Superfund sites in these states may be
subject to a delayed cleanup or less stringent EPA oversight of clean up activities
6 being conducted by polluters. The longer these sites remain polluted, the
greater the potential threat to the health of neighboring communities.
Unfortunately, EPA has refused
to divulge information pertaining to which Superfund sites could be affected
by the administrative slowdown. As a result, this report can only project, not
confirm, which sites will remain polluted longer or fall under lax EPA oversight.
EPA is the only organization that can give the public this information. Citizens
have a right-to-know whether sites in their community will be affected; EPA
should quickly respond to public requests for such information.
One compelling reason to
ensure this right-to-know is that Superfund sites threaten public health of
nearby communities. One in four people in America lives within four miles of
a Superfund site. Eighty-five percent of all Superfund sites have contaminated
groundwater. Fifty percent of the U.S. population, and almost all residents
in many rural areas, rely on groundwater for drinking water. Children born to
parents living within one-quarter mile of a toxic waste site are at greater
risk of suffering birth defects.
Policy Recommendations
- To ensure that people
know if Superfund sites in their community will be affected by the Bush administration's
recent shift in policy, we urge the administration to tell the public which
sites will be affected by a lack of funding.
- In order for EPA to expeditiously
clean up the nation's most heavily contaminated toxic waste sites, we urge
the administration to support the reauthorization of Superfund's polluter
pays taxes.
- To maintain our nation's
belief in making polluters pays, and to retain the benefits to public health
and environmental quality that flow from this principle, we urge the Bush
administration to reduce the amount of money it takes from taxpayers to fund
cleanups.
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