LegiStorm

Summary:

Although environmental cleanup and waste management policies have a common goal to reduce risk to human health and the environment they raise distinct policy questions that are generally addressed with different policy approaches. For instance, environmental cleanup issues generally require reactive public policies that seek to address an existing problem: environmental contamination. Waste management issues, on the other hand, typically deal with current waste materials, and thus involve proactive policies, initiated to prevent environmental damages. Environmental cleanup issues continue to generate interest among policymakers. For much of the 20th Century, the standard method of waste disposal was to bury the waste or dump it in a nearby waterway. This resulted in thousands of contaminated properties owned by private parties and the federal government, some of which posed dangerous threats to human health. This problem is nationwide. To address this problem of waste from past activities, Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA, commonly referred to as Superfund). CERCLA authorizes the federal government to clean up contaminated sites in the United States and to make the “potentially responsible parties connected to those sites financially liable for the cleanup costs. CERCLA created the Superfund program to carry out these authorities. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for administering the program. The cleanup of contaminated sites under the Superfund program has generated continuing debate of various issues within Congress over the past several years, with particular focus on two funding questions: (1) how the program is funded, and (2) whether the program is receiving an adequate level of funding. Dedicated taxes on petroleum, chemical feedstocks, and corporate income initially financed most of the Superfund program, but the taxes expired at the end of 1995. As revenues from these taxes were expended, Congress increased the share of contributing revenues from the General Fund of the U.S. Treasury to maintain program funding levels. The Superfund program now is funded primarily with these general Treasury revenues. In recent years, some Members have introduced legislation to reinstate the original Superfund tax, arguing that under the polluter pays principle, industry, not the general public, should bear the cleanup costs associated with industry-caused pollution. On the other hand, opponents of the Superfund tax have observed that not all of the taxed companies necessarily caused contamination, and that the tax therefore could be viewed as unfair in certain instances in that it may capture some parties who are not polluters. Opponents of the tax have emphasized that EPA has continued to take enforcement actions against the responsible parties to require them to pay for the cleanup of contamination that they caused or to which they contributed. In this sense, opponents of the tax note that polluters have continued to pay for the cleanup of contamination for which they are responsible, and that the “polluter pays principle” has remained in effect. In addition to the source of funding, the availability of annual funding to meet cleanup needs has been an ongoing issue. While EPA may take enforcement actions to require the responsible parties to pay for the costs of cleanup, not all of the parties may be financially viable, or some of them simply may not be found, creating €œorphan shares€ of the cleanup costs which are borne by the Superfund program. There has been much debate about the level of funding that is necessary to pay these orphan shares to perform cleanup at an adequate pace and to a degree that is protective of human health and the environment. Although annual appropriations for the Superfund program have remained nominally steady over the past decade, some have drawn attention to the decline in real resources as a result of inflation over time.