Polluters Should Pay

A little over an hour from Boston, across from an elementary school in the heart of Fairhaven, Mass., sits the Atlas Tack Company. More than 7,000 people live within a mile of Atlas. More than 15,000 live within three miles. And for more than twenty years, Atlas released cyanide, arsenic and other toxic solvents into an adjacent marsh. Then in 1990, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials finally put the site on their National Priorities List for cleanup under the Superfund program—a landmark initiative from 1980 that used to force polluters to pay for the damage they did.

But after fourteen years, Atlas has still not been cleaned up. Just last year, President Bush put it and nine other sites scheduled for long-overdue care on hold because of a $227 million shortfall in the Superfund budget.

Yet the story of the Atlas site is not extraordinary. Indeed, there are over a thousand superfund sites languishing on EPA lists that continue to be a danger to communities across the country. And just this week, for the third year in a row, Bush added an unusually low number of new sites to the National Priorities List and encouraged Superfund budget cuts.

To those who remember Superfund’s glory days—back in the ’80s and ’90s when it was flush with money—the program’s funding problems may seem unbelievable. It all stems from Congress’s decision in 1995 to turn its back on the principle that polluters should pay to clean up the messes they make. Until 1995, Superfund got most of its money from polluters. In most cases, the company that contaminated a site would pay to clean it up. In cases where no existing company was responsible for a contaminated site—so-called orphan sites—Superfund relied on a trust fund which companies from polluting industries were compelled to pay into.

In 1995, Congress failed to reauthorize the trust fund, shifting the burden from polluters to taxpayers. Since then, polluters have enjoyed a $4 million-a-day tax break at the expense of everyone else. In 1995, taxpayers covered just 18 percent of Superfund’s costs. This year, they will pay for a larger portion of the program. And now that the president has plunged the country into fiscal crisis, right-wing opponents of Superfund have an excuse to cut the program’s funding. Just when the Bush administration claimed it could not afford to add sites to the National Priorities list, it worked with its allies in Congress to cut Superfund funding by $8 million. Superfund spending is down more than 24 percent from average spending under President Clinton. Bush claims cuts to programs like Superfund are necessary to balance the budget, but if the Republicans had not gotten polluters off the hook, Superfund would not aggravate the budget at all.

As funding cuts take their toll, more and more sites are getting ignored. In the mid to late ’90s, Superfund cleaned up an average of 87 sites per year. In 2003, the program cleaned less than half that number. If Superfund continues to be the victim of tight budgets and misplaced priorities, even more sites will end up like Atlas.

The folks who live next to the Atlas site, like those who live near more than 1,200 active Superfund sites nationwide, are the victims of a president and a Congress that puts polluters before people. Though we doubt President Bush and his kangaroo Congress will have a change of heart, reauthorizing the trust fund would be the right thing to do. And, in the meantime, Congress ought not cut Superfund’s budget anymore. The people of Fairhaven deserve better than that.