Environmental Health Reports

Cleanup Slowdown: How Under-Funding The Superfund Program Harms Communities Across America

8/7/2003

Executive Summary

One in four people in America, including more than 10 million children, lives within four miles of a Superfund toxic waste site. Eighty-five percent of all Superfund sites have contaminated groundwater; half of Americans, including most of those living in 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.

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 companies pay to clean up contaminated sites for which they are specifically responsible. Second, Superfund assesses fees, known as “polluter pays” fees, on the purchase of chemicals and petroleum and levies a small corporate environmental income tax on large companies. These “polluter pays” fees should provide enough money to cover the operation of the program and allow the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean up sites when the agency cannot locate the polluters, the companies have gone bankrupt, or when they refuse to undertake cleanup activities.

In order to protect communities whose health is at risk, the Superfund program requires a commitment of resources. Two factors have deprived the program of necessary funds. First, the Bush administration has under-funded the program; estimates are that the program will be under-funded by a total of $1.2 to $1.8 billion from 2001 to 2004. An EPA Inspector General’s report in October 2002 showed that 78 Superfund sites that requested funding in fiscal year 2002 received no or only partial funding. This under-funding coincides with a decline in the number of sites cleaned up annually under the Bush administration. By the late 1990s, EPA was cleaning up an average of 87 sites per year. The Bush administration has dramatically decreased the pace of cleanups by nearly 50 percent over the last two years.

Second, the polluter pays fees expired in 1995. The Bush administration opposes reinstatement of Superfund’s fees, taking a position contrary to Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton, who all collected or supported reinstatement of the fees. When the fees expired in 1995, Superfund had a surplus of $3.6 billion. At the end of 2004, the trust fund will be essentially gone.

By opposing collection of polluter pays fees, the administration has increased the share of the program’s costs carried by regular taxpayers from 18 percent in 1995 to a proposed 79 percent or more in 2004. In 2005, taxpayers will pick up virtually the entire bill. The administration’s policies mark a dramatic reversal of the standards that have guided the cleanup of toxic waste sites in this country for more than 20 years. The Bush administration is making taxpayers pay more and requiring polluters to pay less, while cleaning up fewer of the nation’s worst toxic waste sites.

This report details the potential local impacts of the Bush administration’s under-funding of the Superfund program and its failure to reinstate the polluter pays fees. Five hundred twenty-two Superfund sites in 48 states and the U.S. territories—representing 42 percent of all Superfund sites—may be subject to a delayed cleanup or less stringent EPA oversight of cleanup activities conducted by polluters.

The 10 states with the most Superfund sites potentially affected by a lack of funding are New Jersey (78), New York (49), Pennsylvania (37), California (37), Texas (25), Florida (24), Illinois (17), Michigan (16), Massachusetts (15), and Washington (13). The longer these sites remain polluted, the greater the threat to the health of neighboring communities.

Unfortunately, EPA has not publicly identified which Superfund sites could be affected by the slowdown in cleanups. 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.

Policy Recommendations:

• To ensure that polluters, rather than taxpayers, pay to clean up the nation's Superfund sites, the Bush administration should support reinstatement of Superfund's polluter pays fees.

• To ensure EPA's ability to expeditiously clean up the nation's most heavily contaminated toxic waste sites, the Bush administration should fully fund the Superfund program in tandem with reinstating the polluter pays fees.

• To ensure the public's right-to-know, the Bush administration should inform the public which toxic waste sites will languish for a lack of funding.

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