Sinking Cities With Superfund

The Superfund program, created in 1980, requires polluters to finance hazardous waste cleanup. For nearly a year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tried to fashion a sensible guideline for settling the Superfund liabilities of local governments whose household and office trash have ended up in polluted landfills. But now its efforts have hit a stone wall in the White House.

How much do cities add to the toxic waste problem? While the volume of municipal trash at some Superfund sites is large, less than 1% of typical municipal trash includes hazardous materials.

EPA policy is generally to sue only industrial-waste contributors to a Superfund site to recover cleanup costs. But the law makes all waste contributors, including cities, potentially liable for site cleanup, regardless of how much waste they deposited or how toxic that waste was. Consequently, industrial polluters have often named cities as third parties in an effort to reduce their own financial obligations.

That’s what happened to Alhambra and Rosemead. Along with a dozen other cities and Los Angeles County, they were sued by more than 60 industrial contributors to the Operating Industries Inc. landfill in Monterey Park. Cleanup estimates at this site range from $500 million to $800 million and the industrial polluters contend that cleanup of the municipal wastes could account for as much as 90% of the total.

Costs in this range could bankrupt a small city.

To prevent such bankruptcies--which would increase local taxes and force massive cuts in public service-the EPA issued a draft guideline in March limiting local government liability to 4% of the cleanup cost at many sites.

That seems fair. But industries most affected by this policy change--including the petroleum and chemical industries--were unhappy. They leaned heavily on the vice president’s Competitiveness Council, and the council, in turn, buttonholed the White House. The result: the Administration told the EPA to rethink its 4% limit.

But industry has miscast the EPA guideline as yet another burdensome environmental regulation stifling business. It is, instead, designed to encourage responsible hazardous waste disposal practices, not pass the buck for litigation and massive cleanup to local taxpayers. The White House should step aside.