Now Everyone’s Getting Interested in Superfund

According to the LA Times yesterday, Senator Barbara Boxer accused the Environmental Protection Agency of not disclosing information on about 140 Superfund sites where human exposures remained uncontrolled. EPA’s response is that they’ve limited access only to enforcement-related data, and not health or exposure-related information. It sounds like one of the issues of contention is data on the estimated time to achieve cleanup, which arguably could have both enforcement and public health consequences.

As expected, Senate Republicans accused the Democrats of trying to manufacture a political issue, and of “seeking to reinstate a controversial tax in which chemical manufacturers and other companies were forced to pay a fee to contribute to cleaning up waste sites, even if the firms played no role in creating the mess”. . .

. . . controversial tax?

That wouldn’t happen to be referring to the taxes on chemical manufacturing, oil refining and corporate profits that historically provided the funding for Superfund, and that expired in 1995. The Republican leadership in Congress has opposed reinstatement of the taxes without changes (or reforms, depending on your spot in the political spectrum) in the liability provisions in Superfund. The debate has brought Superfund reauthorization to a halt for over 10 years. Further description of the taxes can be found here.

There was a bit of a ripple in the blogs over this story, focusing on the aspect of EPA “hiding” data from Congress. Without more specifics about what was or wasn’t being disclosed, it’s hard for me to get too worked up about this particular issue. It seems that Sen. Boxer has had a running battle with EPA over disclosure issues. Actually, what’s more interesting to me is the fact this was the first oversight hearing on Superfund by the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund and Waste Management in four years. I had given up hope long ago that Congress was going to take up the subject of Superfund reauthorization, though as you can see here, it hasn’t been entirely inactive on this subject.

Superfund has grown beyond a cleanup program to potentially become a tool for economic revitalization (through the provisions designed to address brownfields and worker training), but the issues of risk assessment, cleanup standards and remedy selection are what give Superfund its mission to protect public health. The debate will go on about whether or not risks from hazardous waste sites are over- or understated, but at some point, we as Americans need to reach a consensus about how to address the hazardous waste site legacy, whether it’s treat, dig up, pump out, fence off or leave alone.

We’ve already explored the lessons on how to reach this consensus – we just need to pick them up again. For example, back in the dimly-remember mid-1990s, several documents were published that discussed how the assessment of environmental health risks could be improved. Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society published in 1996 by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) addresses the topic of using risk assessment to make better informed and more trustworthy decisions about human and environmental health risks. While the book focuses on the limitations of risk assessment that cause it to fall short of these expectations, it makes a key point that “[a]cceptance of risk decisions by a broad spectrum of the interested and affected parties is usually critical to their implementation”.

The Presidential and Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management (1996-1997) published a report intended to stimulate agency policies, legislation, and private sector activities to improve risk assessment and risk management (a quick summary is here). A core element of the risk assessment framework articulated by this commission was stakeholder involvement. The guidelines laid out in the report included clarifying the goals for stakeholder involvement, and involving stakeholders early in a risk decision-making process; attempt to engage all potentially affected stakeholders and solicit a diversity of perspectives, even using “appropriate incentives to encourage stakeholder participation”.

A thorough examination of the Superfund program was conducted in 2001 by Resources for the Future, which particularly gets at the answer of how much money is needed by EPA to finish the job of cleaning up hazardous waste sites.

Ok, I’m glad that Congress is paying more attention to Superfund, but it’s still annoying that it took more than 10 years for it to happen and it would be nice if there could be more dialog with EPA rather than “you don’t tell me anything”.