PERSPECTIVE ON THE SUPERFUND : Bring Fair Play to Toxic Cleanup : Minority communities suffer the most; here’s how to benefit them and revive our environmental commitment.

American businesses are the most powerful force for economic equality in this country. Too often, though, they have viewed the concept of economic justice as an adversarial battle between business and minority groups. It need not be so.

Last spring, for example, the NAACP signed a historic agreement with Flagstar Companies, the owner of Denny’s and other restaurants, after accusations of racial discrimination at several Denny’s restaurants. The agreement committed the company to a far-reaching effort to recruit and train minority managers and staff, as well as minority-owned franchises. Flagstar also pledged to increase its use of minority firms for professional services such as banking and insurance.

As the Flagstar agreement shows, businesses can assume a far greater role in the encouragement of real economic justice. It is in business’ interests and in the country’s interests that such efforts expand. One especially promising area for the creation of new models is in hazardous-waste cleanup.

A series of studies and reports, starting in 1982 with a General Accounting Office report and including studies by the United Church of Christ and the National Law Journal, found that people of color face discrimination in positioning and cleaning up hazardous-waste. Also, when it comes to toxic-waste cleanup under the federal Superfund, the law, business and the communities involved are often in conflict, a major cause of the Superfund’s disappointing record: In 13 years, fewer than 150 of the 1,275 top priority sites have been cleaned up; thousands of lawsuits are pending and billions of dollars are being frittered away on activities that have nothing to do with public health.

As a civil-rights leader and two business executives, we think the Denny’s experience offers some intriguing lessons and possibilities for creating cleaner communities and local jobs. But first, the contentious, balky Superfund law will have to be overhauled.

The Superfund should be, above all, a public health and environmental-protection program. But that is clearly not the current focus. At the typical Superfund site, dozens of businesses--small and large--local governments and individuals battle with one another, with the Environmental Protection Agency, with state officials and with citizens over what needs to be done and who should pay. They battle because of strict Superfund retroactive liability financing, which assesses cleanup costs based on each party’s percentage of blame. Then, many parties sue their insurers. What a colossal waste. Worse, it divides the community, fomenting distrust and delay.

We need to find a way for both business and community to view the law as public-health and environmental benefit as well as economic opportunity.

How can we get to that point? Start with this set of eight core principles:

Shift the law’s focus so its primary goal is public health and environmental protection; increase funding to ensure prompter cleanups; rank cleanup sites so those that pose the greatest danger, alone or in combination with other environmental hazards in the area, get addressed first; permit flexibility in remedy selection so that the economic and health interests of the community are served; replace today’s counterproductive, site-by-site liability battles with an expanded trust fund financed by broad-based taxes on business; increase public participation and community empowerment early and throughout the process; enhance positive incentives for sound waste management, and focus existing health, economic and community development resources on communities that have been disproportionately harmed by toxic waste and emissions.

This approach offers something for all stake-holders, whether their paramount goals are public health and environmental protection, prompt cleanup, lower legal costs, fairness, community participation or sound waste management.

In addition to getting more rapid, effective cleanup, why not use a portion of Superfund dollars in minority and disadvantaged communities to train these citizens to clean up their own communities? Why not focus environmental legal resources on parties who break the laws today instead of endless litigation on yesterday’s failings?

Incredibly, about 1,000 of the EPA’s 3,000-plus Superfund staff are lawyers or provide support for lawyers. Today, it seems, lawyers are there first, last and always. With a larger Superfund financed primarily by business taxes, along with fundamental reform of the current liability system, regulators can put public-health hats on first and keep them on; jobs can be created and businesses can become the partners rather than the adversaries of communities.