State Running Dry on Funds to Clean Toxic Waste Dumps

The cleanup of 50 toxic waste sites in California is jeopardized because the state has virtually run out of $100 million in toxic site cleanup funds, according to Department of Health Services officials.

Only between $1 million and $3 million remains from 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 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.

Officials statewide have identified 323 toxic sites, some of which were so polluted 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 put in its own contributions to continue the work, and Borzelleri said he did not know of any such instances.

About 80% 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.

But the remaining 20% of the 323 sites were being cleaned up directly by the state Department of Health Services through the $100-million bond issue 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 will 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 Ways and Means Committee last August, when the Legislature adjourned.

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 were also looking for other emergency funding, including help from the EPA itself.

Borzelleri said the department is confident money will be freed up 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 he assumed that some sites in California were on the verge of being cleaned up, with officials having all but allocated the money to hire contractors to finish the work. Those projects will remain idle until new money is found, he said.

A number of Southern California sites are likely to be affected by the budget shortfall. These include Chem-o-lene, a chemical storage facility in Ventura; Eskimo Radiator, a Los Angeles radiator manufacturer; Chatham Brothers, a San Diego solvent recycling yard, and Orange County Steel Salvage, an Anaheim automobile shredding plant.

Also jeopardized are cleanups at Southland Oil Inc. 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 that now is under a residential neighborhood in Westminster.

Other sites might not be so affected because work at them, including soil investigations, already was authorized and money approved. Those projects will continue until the authorized work is completed. “It’s entirely possible,” Borzelleri said, “that by the time they finish that work, new money will have been allocated for them to keep continuing, and this (lack of funds) will be mostly transparent to them.”

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.