Administration encourages Superfund critics

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
May 29, 2002

The Bush administration didn't invent opposition to Superfund cleanups, but its attitude toward industrial pollutants, particularly mining waste, arguably catalyzed the reaction across the West.

In New Mexico, critics say Phelps-Dodge was emboldened enough by the prevailing sentiment to ask New Mexico state officials to ease a tax that ensures cleanup and reclamation at mine sites, with company officials promising the firm wouldn't neglect its public duties.

In Arizona, the state Superfund program spent 16 years and $33 million wading through a legal tangle of identifying responsible companies, without ever cleaning one site. This year, when advocates say the legal battles were nearly over and work was ready to begin, state lawmakers cut $10 million from the budget and are eyeing a $15 million cut next year.

Gov. Jane Hull has proposed adding $10 million back next year, and supporters are summoning up the specter of calling in the EPA, if lawmakers balk.

Federal Superfund cleanups have been halved under the Bush administration, according to a report by Montana Public Interest Research Group, which said Christine Whitman's EPA asked for $1.4 billion less than estimates say the agency will need to clean up the nation's worst sites.

The study didn't include asbestos cleanup in Libby, since it had yet to be formally added to the Superfund list, but it said the Libby project could be particularly vulnerable to funding cuts because of the enormity of the effort and expense.

The report said nine of 13 Superfund sites in Montana could expect delayed or curtailed cleanup under administration plans.

Meanwhile, the EPA again noted that Nevada, Utah and Arizona were the top three states in the nation for the release of toxic pollutants in 2000, a distinction the agency attributed to hardrock mining. They have topped the list each year since 1998, when the EPA started counting mining wastes in the annual report.

A Nevada environmental group asked the state Division of Environmental Protection to add at least 40 streams and rivers across the state to its Clean Water Act list of impaired waters, all polluted by mining activity, the group said. The list included, as one example, Steamboat Creek near Reno, allegedly contaminated with mercury used at gold and silver mills in the late 1800s.

But nowhere has the reaction been as intense as in north Idaho, where the EPA wants to extend the 21-square mile Bunker Hill Superfund site to include the entire Coeur d'Alene basin to the Washington border, and where the Bush administration fanned opposition by transferring an ombudsman critical of the agency.

Area businesses and local officials are trying to rebuild an economy that depended on now-closed mines, and they say a budding high-tech sector will wilt under a Superfund label.

And company loyalty is still potent among residents, who see no need to clean up tailings piles and contaminated lawns, although local kids once had the highest levels of lead in their blood ever recorded.

In January, a handful of residents filed suit against mining companies for poisoning the air and water.

By February, both supporters and detractors of an expanded Superfund project had launched antagonistic public relations campaigns.

A week later, Idaho's congressional delegation weighed in, with members saying they were suspicious of the EPA's studies that justified a broader cleanup and calling for a review by the National Academy of Sciences.

Most of the towns in the Silver Valley filed suit against the EPA to stop designation of a bigger Superfund site.

Laced through the events were the EPA ombudsman's charges that he and his investigator were being placed under the thumb of administration officials to quell their criticism of the cleanup at Bunker Hill and other sites across the country.

Ombudsman Robert Martin's complaints were loud and public, and found sympathetic ears among north Idaho residents and politicians.

Martin has since resigned, the cities have dropped their suit against the EPA for lack of money and support, and the agency still has yet to announce its final decision.

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