House Environmentalists Vow to Block Superfund Bill : Panel’s Renewal of Cleanup Program Denounced as ‘Toothless’; Compromise Foreseen

California Rep. Henry A. Waxman and other House environmentalists, badly beaten in a crucial Commerce Committee vote on new Superfund legislation, pledged Friday to block the committee’s bill from House passage rather than accept a “toothless” renewal of the nation’s biggest toxic-dump cleanup program.

But congressional lobbyists predicted that Waxman’s threat probably contained more bark than bite--and several forecast that Congress would produce compromise legislation acceptable to the environmentalists before the current Superfund law expires Sept. 30.

In a news conference, Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Rep. James J. Florio (D-N.J.) blistered fellow members of the Commerce Committee for approving Thursday what Waxman called “one of the best sweetheart deals ever produced” for the oil and chemical industries.

‘Waste of Money’

“If this is the bill that passes” the House, Florio said, “we will not be ensuring . . . protection. We will be ensuring a waste of money.”

More than 850 of the nation’s worst abandoned landfills and dumps already are marked for cleanup with federal Superfund matching grants, with at least 1,500 more to be added. But the long-troubled Superfund program has finished cleanups at only a handful of dumps in five years, and efforts elsewhere have been hogtied by red tape and mismanagement.

Waxman, Florio and a handful of other House environmentalists have backed legislation that would both increase spending to clean dumps and set cleanup standards that the Environmental Protection Agency would be legally bound to obey.

The Commerce Committee’s five-year extension of the Superfund program would raise spending on toxic-dump cleanups from the current $300 million-a-year pace to $2 billion a year, a figure environmental groups support.

No Cleanup Deadlines

But the legislation omits the huge checklist of cleanup deadlines, safety standards, restrictions on the disposal of Superfund dump waste and other measures that Waxman had deemed essential to any expanded program.

The committee bill also includes several amendments crafted to exclude some industries, such as the petroleum business, from strict or costly pollution cleanup measures.

“The bill utterly fails to produce a program that will ensure an increase in the number of facilities addressed and effectiveness of cleanups that do occur,” A. Blakeman Early, Washington representative of the Sierra Club, said Friday. “We can give the EPA a lot of money, as this bill does, but unless Congress is specific about how it is spent . . . it either won’t be spent, or it won’t get spent well.”

The EPA has contended that it cannot efficiently spend more than $900 million a year on Superfund cleanups.

Environmentalists Defeated

The Commerce Committee’s action was a stinging defeat for Waxman and Florio and a victory both for industry and for committee Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), an environmental moderate and one of Congress’s most powerful--and autocratic--committee heads.

Among other clauses criticized by environmentalists, the bill was altered by oil-state legislators to limit to $3 million the liability of companies whenever an underground storage tank containing petroleum leaks its contents.

Hundreds of thousands of such tanks lie below gas stations and elsewhere, and scores of thousands are said to leak. Several major leaks already have cost millions to clean.

In what environmentalists called a bow to the electric utility industry, the bill also exempts, at least temporarily, waste sites from Superfund cleanup that contain fly ash, a byproduct of combustion.

In addition, the bill would ban states from imposing more strict cleanup standards for Superfund sites than are required by the federal government, unless states themselves shoulder the additional cleanup costs. Environmentalists argued that the clause would shift the cost of some cleanups from polluters, who are legally liable for the cost of Superfund actions, to taxpayers.

Senate Bill Blocked

In the Senate, a Superfund bill allotting $7.5 billion over five years has passed two committees but is being held back from a final floor vote because of White House opposition.

Waxman and Florio said Friday that they would prefer to enact a brief extension of the current Superfund law, passed in 1980, if the House Commerce Committee legislation is the only alternative. Their hope, experts said, is that tougher Superfund legislation--said to be politically popular--would become an issue in the 1986 congressional elections.

That tactic almost worked in 1984, the last election year, when the Commerce Committee and the full House passed a Superfund bill considerably stricter than the one approved Thursday. The Senate refused then to enact a bill, however, so no law entered the books.

One environmental lobbyist said Friday that “there will clearly be, as a result of Waxman’s and Florio’s posturing, movement toward a better bill” from the environmentalists’ point of view. “The question for them is where to draw the line,” he added.