Tourist Towns Often Find Superfund Label More a Bonus Than a Blot

When Butte, Mont., got a Superfund site, some residents’ outlook was more bleak than the moonscape of mining waste in a section of town called Lower Area One.

“That’s the last thing you want in your moniker--’Visit Butte, the largest Superfund designation in the United States,”’ said Jon Sesso, the city-county Superfund coordinator.

But worries that the 1983 listing, covering 40 miles of stream and shoreline fouled by mine tailings, would drive away business and hurt tourism vanished along with the messy wastes.

Butte found that a designation as one of the nation’s worst waste dumps wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Superfund brought jobs, revenue and development--and tourism is up in a city that boasts of sites like an old brothel, the World Museum of Mining and Our Lady of the Rockies shrine.

Lower Area One has become an enticing set of four ponds with a hiking trail that so impressed city leaders, they made it a scheduled stop on the summer trolley tour.

“We admit we’re a Superfund site--and we admit we’re thrilled to death to have them cleaning up,” said Connie Kenney, executive vice president of the Butte-Silver Bow Chamber of Commerce. “When you start cleaning up, it makes you look real progressive.”

Negative Publicity in the Short Term

Other tourism towns also report no long-term damage from the 1980 federal law that has resulted in 1,219 current designations of hazardous waste sites from coast to coast.

That doesn’t mean cities roll out the welcome mat for Superfund.

Some officials feel designations are unwarranted or just plain wrong. Negative publicity and a stigma may keep some visitors and new businesses away in the short term.

And cities often face years of frustration as they try to get information from the Environmental Protection Agency and witness an often agonizingly slow pace of cleanup work.

In Leadville, Colo., the EPA’s Superfund designation in 1983 was about as welcome as a Thanksgiving Day blizzard.

The town that prides itself on being the highest incorporated city in Colorado, at more than 10,000 feet, was recovering from the decay of the former No. 1 industry that gave Leadville its name--mining.

City leaders were at first suspicious of federal regulation. They especially didn’t want to discourage new business, erode property values or burden residents with cleanup costs.

Those initial apprehensions were followed by years of negotiations and legal wranglings that brought no tangible results.

“There was a lot of concern,” said Mike Holmes, the EPA project manager for Superfund in Leadville. “There was about 12 years of the town living with a label or stigma of being a Superfund site.”

But since 1995, the EPA has spent several hundred thousand dollars in Leadville, improving water quality, boosting trout runs and helping add amenities such as a bicycle trail.

Effort to Preserve Historic Image

Agency officials have tried not to tamper with the city’s historic image. Instead of capping mining waste with vegetation, the agency is using rock.

The old mine waste piles still look like old mine waste piles. Town residents appreciate that.

“To us it’s history,” said Anne Dougherty, marketing director for nearby Ski Cooper. “Don’t call that [pile] a mine dump--that’s my history.”

Tourism is on the rise in Leadville, with its bed and breakfasts, old railroad cars and National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum.

Tourism is also strong in Front Royal, Va., near an entrance of the popular Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah Mountains, despite the 1986 Superfund designation of a synthetics plant.

At least some visitors initially may have thought twice about coming to the city, with its 440-acre site contaminated with zinc hydroxide sludge and other wastes.

But after doggedly pushing EPA to work with community leaders, residents are excited about plans to convert the site into a riverfront park with soccer fields and a hotel and business development aiming to attract high technology jobs.

They say the long-term effects of Superfund have been good.

The designation was “a painful step in the right direction,” said Rick Novak, chairman of the Warren County Economic Development Authority. “If you have a problem, you have to admit there is a problem.”

But in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where tourism is the No. 1 industry, local officials are upset with EPA plans to assess water quality in Lake Coeur d’Alene and other nearby waterways and possibly make a Superfund designation.

The water in Lake Coeur d’Alene, despite EPA concerns that it may contain remnants of the mining industry, is among the cleanest in the nation, the officials insist.

They worry that a Superfund designation would create a false image of the city.

“How do you get the word out that the water’s clean?” said Jonathan Coe, the Chamber of Commerce president. “If we never had any association with this, we would be far happier.”

Kerri Thoreson, who heads the chamber in nearby Post Falls, said the idea that Kootenai County water is dirty is a myth surpassed in audacity only by the falsehood that Idaho is full of white supremacists.

But tourists will see that for themselves when they visit, she said. “The best promotion is the bodies of water themselves,” Thoreson said.

The proposed Superfund status of an abandoned sulfur mine in Alpine County, Calif., similarly rattled some residents across the border in Douglas County, Nev.

Some worried the designation would hurt a lucrative tourism industry based on casinos, golf courses and other attractions.

But after meeting with EPA officials, county leaders are convinced that the designation will be focused so as not to harm the county’s economic base.

“So far it’s a positive story,” said Jacques Etchegoyhen, chairman of the Douglas County Commission. “In the long run, the site is going to be much, much cleaner than it is today.”