Funds for Cleaning Up Toxic Sites Drying Up

The cleanup of 50 toxic waste sites in California, including the Chatham Brothers site in Escondido, is jeopardized because the state has virtually run out of $100 million in toxic site cleanup funds, state health officials said.

Only $1 million to $3 million remains in a $100-million bond fund established by California voters in 1984 and officials must now decide how it will be spent among competing toxic sites, said Bob Borzelleri, a spokesman for the the state health department’s toxic substance control division in Sacramento.

Lobbyists from the Department of Health Services will go to the Legislature next month with requests for emergency funding, he said, but in the meantime, work will continue only at those sites where money already has been allocated to complete specific studies and other on-site preparation work.

Escondido Site Among Victims

Among the projects that will grind to a halt is the notorious Chatham Brothers toxic site in southwestern Escondido, which has been the subject of cleanup efforts since 1981, at a cost to date of about $1 million.

State health officials had hoped to begin interim cleanup at the Chatham site in August, but still needed to complete further soil, ground-water and air testing in order to map out the final cleanup plan, said Karen Baker, the project manager overseeing the Chatham project for the Department of Health Services.

But she said the $1.5 million needed for those studies had not been allocated and, as of Wednesday, work at the site had ground to a halt, except for the erecting of a new fence around part of the contaminated area.

The Chatham site was discovered by San Diego County health officials in 1981 as an abandoned, unregulated recycling center for cleaning solvents. The 5-acre site is tainted with PCBs, oil-based cleaning solvent waste and heavy metals, the result of brothers Tom and Robert Chatham’s dumping their recycling waste products on their own property, officials say. Today the site is in the middle of an urban, upscale neighborhood but health officials say area residents do not face health dangers.

323 Sites Identified Statewide

Officials statewide have identified 323 toxic sites, some of which were so severe as to be included in the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s own Superfund list of toxic sites.

Work at the EPA sites would be affected only if they were at the stage where the state was required to kick in its own contributions to continue the work, and Borzelleri said he didn’t know of any such instances.

Most of the 323 sites statewide are being cleaned up by private parties found to be responsible for the toxic waste problems, Borzelleri said. Progress at those sites will not be affected by the money shortage because the cleanup was being financed by the guilty parties.

But 50 sites were being cleaned up directly by the state Department of Health Services through the $100-million bond act of 1984 because the polluting parties either could not be identified or had no money to clean up their sites, he said.

“The $100 million was never intended, by anyone’s stretch of the imagination, to be enough to complete all the work in the state,” Borzelleri said. Officials projected that the money would dry up by this spring.

In anticipation of that, department officials sought legislative approval to place another $100-million bond issue on the ballot for last month’s general election. But that attempt died in the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee last August, when the Legislature adjourned.

Funding Request

Jim McRitchie, acting chief of the department’s office of legislation and regulation, said another funding request, for an amount not yet determined, is being readied to take to lawmakers in January. Officials are also looking for other emergency funding, including help from the EPA itself.

Borzelleri said the department is confident money will be freed from Sacramento so the toxic cleanup work can continue without losing much momentum, because of the state’s commitment to toxic cleanup.

“We were within a couple of months of what we thought would happen, in terms of the (1984 bond issue) money running out,” Borzelleri said. “At the same time, we were very hopeful that some sort of decision would have been made during the last session of the Legislature. But it never got out of committee.”

He said that, of the 50 toxic sites the state is cleaning up, about 20--including the Chatham site--will be most affected by the shortfall because they are farthest along in being cleaned.

Additional Sites

Besides the Chatham site, six other sites among the 20 most affected by the shortfall are in Southern California. They are Chem-o-lene, a chemical storage facility in Ventura; Eskimo Radiator, a Los Angeles radiator manufacturer; Orange Co. Steel Salvage, an Anaheim automobile shredding plant; Southland Oil, a former oil reclamation facility in the City of Commerce; Western States Refining, a Fontana precious metal recovery plant, and an oil field waste dump under a residential neighborhood in Westminster.

The 30 other sites will be less affected because their cleanup is at such a preliminary stage, and because less-expensive tasks there already had been budgeted and the money had been approved.

“It’s entirely possible,” he said, “that by the time they finish (preliminary) work, new money will have been allocated for them to keep continuing, and this (lack of funds) will be mostly transparent to them.”

Word of the funds depletion was aired Tuesday night at a community meeting in Escondido where state health officials were updating neighbors as to the status of the project. Just two weeks ago, at a similar meeting, officials assured residents there was sufficient money to continue the clean-up work.

“A few weeks ago we thought we were in better shape than it turned out we are,” Borzelleri said Wednesday. “So we’re pulling in the horses.”

General Kitty

The problem was caused, he said, because money is not allocated at the outset to finance specific projects, but rather is kept in a general kitty, to be drawn out for particular cleanup jobs as work on those projects progress.

As initial studies are completed and work at a particular site progresses and nears actual cleanup, the cost of that project increases dramatically, he said. Preliminary work had been completed at most of the sites around the state, and in recent months the bond money was being spent at a quicker pace, as more and more sites began requesting more money for the cleanup homestretch.

“The faster we were moving towards to the later stages of activities at each of the sites--the closer we were getting to the end--the expenses at the sites increased geometrically,” he said.

The state does not allocate money to specific sites based on priority ratings, he said, because work at a particular site can be stalled for any number of reasons for years at a time, and the money goes unspent when it is needed immediately at another site, he said. Furthermore, he said, the rating of the various sites proved ineffective because their status would change during continued study. Department officials finally decided to release the funds on an as-needed basis to each site as work there progressed.

Current Plan

Within the next 10 days, officials will determine how much work has been completed, and what remains, at each of the toxic sites, and how to allocate the last dollars until new funding arrives, Borzelleri said.

At the Chatham site in Escondido, barrels of waste solvents were removed several years ago, and officials have been analyzing the extent of contamination beneath the surface, including to what degree the ground water, which feeds ultimately into Lake Hodges, a source of potable water, has been tainted. Tests to date indicate the contamination of the ground water has not gone outside the perimeter of the site itself.

So far the state has removed surface barrels from the site, erected a fence around it, built up an earthen berm around it to contain rainwater runoff, and placed plastic sheeting over the site. But some barrels remain buried beneath the surface and the soil itself remains contaminated.

The state had planned to remove the buried barrels this spring, as a remedial cleanup. But those plans are now stalled as well. The cost of cleaning the site is expected to eventually run more than $10 million.

Margaret Herman, spokesman for a group calling itself Escondido Neighbors Against Chemical Toxins, said residents were stunned by the news that the money had run out.

“Oh boy, what a shock,” she said. “You know how slow the state is anyway. This may delay things permanently, and we just can’t have any more delays.

“We’re trying to rally together. We’re sending telegrams to the governor’s office. Those barrels underground are deteriorating even as we speak,” she said.

Diane Takvorian, spokesman for the Environmental Health Coalition in San Diego, said her group will ask Gov. George Deukmejian to seek emergency funding and said the state’s auditor general will be asked to conduct an investigation into how the $100 million has been spent.