Cleaning Up Superfund Itself : Clinton tries to inject new life into this bust of a program

Few would argue that Superfund, the 14-year-old federal program designed to clean up the nation’s most polluted places, has been a success.

Superfund’s problems have been as obvious as the toxic stew that has bubbled to the surface at the most egregious sites: too much litigation and too little cleanup. A recent RAND study concluded that as much as a third of all money spent on Superfund cleanup projects had gone to pay for lawyers fighting over cleanup responsibilities. And the discovery of new polluted sites has far outpaced cleanup at previously known sites. By last year, 1,286 toxic waste sites were on “Superfund’s national priority list” for cleanup. But after government expenditures of $1.5 billion annually--and more by private industry--only 217 sites have been declared officially clean.

President Clinton has pronounced the Superfund program “a disaster” and directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to overhaul the act. But reaching consensus on just how to restructure Superfund has not been easy.

Given the political obstacles to consensus and the financial interests at stake, Clinton has put together a good, thoughtful reform plan. The proposal, presented to Congress this week, should cut the legal wrangling and costs and, most important, speed cleanup. Specifically, Clinton wants to establish a minimum national generic cleanup standard for specific types of wastes to reduce the need for duplicative studies and reviews at each site, and he wants to provide for greater community involvement in determining cleanup standards and future use of Superfund sites. Those ideas make eminent sense.

The Administration also wants to create a fund, financed by the insurance industry, to settle claims on older sites--sites over which the most intense legal wrangling takes place. Getting the industry to agree to this fund--expected to generate between $500 million and $800 million a year--will be tough, but something like this is necessary to finally move the process of toxic cleanup out of the courtroom and onto the waste site.