$8.5-Billion Superfund Plan OKd : Conferees Would Force Industry to Reveal Toxic Leaks

After six months of intense negotiations, House and Senate Superfund conferees have agreed to support a five-year, $8.5-billion hazardous waste cleanup program that sets standards for removal of deadly wastes and requires industry to inform the public when dangerous chemicals are released into the environment.

“We’ve gone a long way toward putting some teeth into the law,” said Rep. James J. Florio (D-N. J.), who participated in the “very contentious” negotiations. “ . . . The whole approach is to decrease EPA’s discretion and hold them more accountable.”

The failure of the negotiators to reach a compromise earlier forced the Environmental Protection Agency to postpone cleaning up hundreds of dumps nationwide. The program lost its taxing authority on Sept. 30, when the old Superfund law expired. In March, Congress approved stopgap funding to prevent a shutdown of the program pending resolution of the negotiations.

Most Differences Resolved

The conferees have now resolved most of the major differences between a $10.5-billion reauthorization bill passed by the House in December and a $7.4-billion Senate plan approved in September.

During its first five years of existence, the Superfund spent $1.6 billion and cleaned up only six dumps, one of which was later found to be leaking dangerous chemicals. The Reagan Administration had sought to raise funding to only $5.3 billion.

Work on the compromise plan is expected to be finished in the next few days, and a separate conference committee will then take up the question of how the program will be funded. Florio predicted that both houses would approve the bill, along with a financing mechanism, before Congress begins its summer recess on Aug. 15.

‘Everybody Has Given a Lot’

“This bill is probably the essence of compromise,” said Linda Fisher, executive assistant to EPA Administrator Lee M. Thomas. “Everybody has given a lot. I don’t know that anybody is against it, but I think that everybody probably could tell you where they would have liked to have done better.”

Environmentalists praised the part of the compromise that would create a massive community-right-to-know program, requiring industries to report the kinds and amounts of hazardous substances on their premises and any release of dangerous chemicals into the environment.

But they complained that the EPA would be given too much authority in determining which substances must be reported. Environmental groups complained also about the loss of House-passed language that would have forced the EPA to have begun cleaning up 600 new sites and to have completed work at 540 of them by the end of five years.

The compromise now simply requires the agency to start work at 375 dumps over the life of the program. There are now 888 dumps on the agency’s National Priorities List, which consists of the nation’s most dangerous dumps, and agency officials have predicted that the list will grow to 2,000 in the next several years.

‘Constant Vigilance’

“You don’t have anything that pushes the EPA to do more sites more quickly,” said Blakeman Early, a Washington representative of the Sierra Club, an environmentalist lobbying group. “That’s going to have to be done through constant vigilance.”

Under the compromise, most dumps would have to meet standards set by various environmental laws, such as the Clean Water Act, before the agency could declare them clean. Critics have complained that the EPA has previously classified as clean some dumps that still posed dangers.

The compromise would also allow citizens to sue the EPA if they believe that a cleanup job is unsatisfactory but would bar them from challenging a proposed cleanup method until after it is in place. In addition, the compromise would set up a $500-million fund to clean up leaking underground storage tanks.

Thomas Gilroy, a spokesman for the Washington-based Chemical Manufacturers Assn., called the compromise “tough” but nevertheless said the group is pleased that an agreement has been reached.

“We didn’t like everything that went in there,” Gilroy said. “But at least we’re moving toward a resolution now.”

The financing of the program remains the only major issue still unresolved. The House reauthorization bill would have required the chemical and oil industries to bear the largest part of the cost.

Value-Added Tax

The Senate bill would have established a new so-called value-added tax on manufactured goods. So far, aides to the negotiators have proposed a new broad-based tax on earnings and profits of large corporations as well as additional taxes on oil and chemical firms.

President Reagan’s advisers have urged him to veto any plan that establishes a new broad-based tax. But Florio, predicting that the final bill will be approved by a two-thirds margin in both houses, said a veto is unlikely.