Washed Up Issue? : Toxics Cleanup Fading as State Officials Turn Attention Elsewhere

In his reelection campaign three years ago, Gov. George Deukmejian artfully dodged a barrage of criticism aimed at his Administration’s failure to clean up toxic dumps scattered throughout the state.

Admitting his own disappointment in the rate that dump sites were being cleaned up, Deukmejian shook up the toxics bureaucracy and put new managers in charge who promised to do a lot better in the governor’s second term.

But the record of the last three years falls far short of those promises of 1986, when Deukmejian won an easy reelection victory over Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley in a campaign in which toxic pollutants became a central issue. Since then, the number of cleanups reported each year has actually dropped--not increased--according to the state Department of Health Services.

Yet, with hundreds of dump sites still to be cleaned up, the issue has all but disappeared from the political agenda in the state Capitol. It has instead become a textbook example of how politicians focus on an issue when it seems to offer political advantage to do so, only to shift their attention elsewhere once the votes have been counted.

Overestimate Ability

It is also stark testimony on the extent to which state officials have overestimated their ability to deal with the highly complex toxics cleanup problem.

In comparing the promises made during the heat of a political campaign with the accomplishments now reported by Deukmejian’s own toxics cleanup unit, The Times has found that:

* Few of the more than 300 toxic dump sites on the state superfund list have been cleaned up, despite a tripling of the state toxics unit staff and a twofold increase in the budget. Over the last three budget years, officials claim credit for cleaning up 43 dump sites--about a third of the 126 they were promising at the end of the gubernatorial campaign.

* Year after year, goals for dump cleanups have been scaled back. In January, 1987, the Administration promised it would clean up 68 hazardous waste sites in the budget year that ended this June 30. In fact, only seven sites were cleaned up, about 1/10th of what had been promised originally.

* Timetables for cleanups at the state’s most notorious sites have stretched out longer and longer. For example, the McColl dump site, which lies under a golf course in a suburban neighborhood in Fullerton, was to be certified as cleaned up this year. But now officials are shooting for 1998. At the Chatham Brothers Barrels site in Escondido--another dump that abuts a residential neighborhood--state officials once predicted a cleanup by January, 1990. Now they are hoping for cleanup in the fall of 1993.

* Toxics officials have spent or committed the entire $100-million cleanup bond issue approved by voters in 1984. However, only $41 million has gone directly to cleanup--to testing contaminated dirt, planning cleanups and actually treating soil or hauling it away, according to state Department of Health Services figures. Much of the rest--$43.2 million--has gone instead to supporting the growing bureaucracy.

* As bond money dried up, cleanup work at a number of sites was delayed last year because of lack of funds. And a funding measure passed by the Legislature and signed into law last week by Deukmejian is likely to mean even less money for direct cleanup than last year, according to legislative and Administration sources.

While there are 317 toxic dump sites on the state’s most recent cleanup list, state officials predict they will eventually add as many as 1,000 more.

Each is an example of past mismanagement of industrial poisons--waste chemicals that were spilled or buried and that represent a threat to the public’s health.

A number of the dumps were once issued permits by government, which underestimated the damage that could be done by buried chemicals rising to the surface or flowing into drinking water supplies. Other sites are the results of illegal dumping by private companies unwilling to pay the cost of proper disposal.

The men who have headed the Administration’s cleanup programs since 1986 admit to having been overly optimistic about how much could be cleaned up when they were first appointed.

“We may have been hoping, through my naivete, that it would go faster, but that hasn’t been the case,” conceded Alex R. Cunningham, chief deputy health services director for toxics management.

Cunningham now describes himself as “cautiously optimistic,” adding: “We’re at last able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

The pace of cleanups has slowed in part because there has been a gradual shift away from what some present and former toxics officials described as “bean counting”--taking credit for numerous small cleanups, no matter how minimal the state involvement.

Tackling the larger, more complex dump sites has proven to take much more time than planned, said Cunningham’s co-manager, health services deputy director C. David Willis. He also noted that the state is trying to use its staff to force private land owners and dumpers to clean sites, rather than doing the cleanup with state money.

Still, Willis is disarmingly blunt in expressing disappointment in the rate of cleanup, particularly in the southern half of the state.

“We’ve had more frustrations than successes in Southern California,” he said.

High staff turnover, especially in the toxics division’s Los Angeles-area offices, has also slowed cleanup work, he said.

However, Willis objected to comparing the number of cleanups actually completed to those projected in the toxic unit’s annual cleanup reports.

“It’s not so much a promise as a plan,” he said. “If we had hit all of them as projected three years away on something as complicated as a cleanup, I would have been shocked and surprised.”

Willis and Cunningham believe the lack of public attention to their once embattled agency is a sign of their success. “You run into people who say, ‘You must be doing good because we don’t see your name in the paper,’ ” Willis said.

Likewise, Deukmejian’s chief of staff, Michael R. Frost, last week told a reporter when asked whether he was satisfied with the progress of toxics cleanups: “Absolutely! You don’t hear much about toxics anymore, people saying ‘the state’s not doing much about it.’ ”

In early 1986, Deukmejian himself drew attention to the toxics cleanup problem in his annual State of the State address. In that election year, the governor said that it was “time for some plain talk about toxics. California and other states have a problem.” He took credit for cleaning up more than 120 sites but complained that other dumps “aren’t being cleaned up fast enough.” In subsequent years, he made passing references to toxic cleanups and spending increases in his annual address to the Legislature.

In this year’s speech, Deukmejian did not mention toxics at all.

Last week, the governor signed a bill that changes the way the toxics cleanup and enforcement programs are funded, eliminating the reliance on bond money and providing an estimated $109 million in fees and taxes. The amount is significantly less than the $129 million budgeted last year.

And in a terse letter to legislators, Deukmejian warned that he “will oppose any efforts to provide additional appropriations to fund any deficiencies.”

Remarkably, Democratic legislators who were among Deukmejian’s sharpest critics three years ago are only mildly critical today of his Administration’s performance.

Several of those interviewed share the temperate views of Baldwin Park Democrat Sally Tanner, who chairs the Assembly Toxics Committee: “There certainly has not been the progress we would like.”

Legislative attention, however, has shifted to other problems. “Two years ago (toxics cleanup) was a very popular issue,” she said. “Now the emphasis is on solid waste, transportation, other issues.”

Agreeing with Tanner is Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), the author of landmark legislation that forced changes in the way industry disposed of its toxic wastes.

Katz conceded that in 1986 the toxics cleanup issue was motivated at least in part by partisan politics. “Democrats used it in the same way Republicans like to use the crime issue to beat up Democrats,” he said.

Even the environmental groups that had been most critical of the Deukmejian Administration cleanup record have turned their attention elsewhere.

Said Sierra Club lobbyist Michael Paparian:

“We’ve spent a lot of our energy, staff time and resources on making sure Proposition 65 is implemented the way it ought to be implemented,” said Paparian, referring to the 1986 ballot measure that increased penalties for the release into the environment of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects. Backed by Mayor Bradley and opposed by Deukmejian, Proposition 65 became part of a Democratic strategy to focus attention on Deukmejian’s toxics cleanup record.

One Capitol toxics expert, who asked not to be identified, offered a cynical explanation of why Democratic politicians have eased their criticism of the Republican Administration. “The issue got stale,” he said. “For a long time it looked like a good campaign issue. But the governor got reelected and now he’s a lame duck and it’s not as much fun.”

After Deukmejian’s reelection, said a former toxics division official, the Administration saw the problem as one of “public relations” and not “public health,” and the public relations problem was brought under control.

“The heat was off,” he said.

Deukmejian Administration officials and their defenders argue that great progress has been made in bringing order to a rapidly growing toxics cleanup bureaucracy--in settling conflicts with the federal government, in collecting fines from illegal dumpers, in issuing permits to disposal facilities, in recruiting and training scientists to supervise cleanup, and in laying the groundwork for more rapid cleanup efforts in the future.

But Penney Newman, a former teacher who now works for the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, is skeptical.

“I think they are spending money,” Newman said. “But I don’t think it is necessarily getting us anywhere.”