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Show Hingkley Journal of Politics 2006 taken away but there is little or no long-term remediation. More importantly, a very small number of these programs have the financial resources to carry out cleanups the size of even an inexpensive NPL cleanup. The average cost to com-Plete a NPL cleanup is about $22 million. Even the top fund-ed state programs could not afford a site of this size. Any site that needs more than $1 to $2 million of public money will Probably be out of the reach of state programs (Stavins, ^003). For those states that do not have well-developed programs, getting a relatively inexpensive site on the NPL may be the only option available for cleanup, let alone a site that Would cost in the hundreds of millions. Except when responsible parties can be identified to pay the costs, only the feder-al government has the financial resources to carry out a cleanup of that size. Stavins (2003) explains that in many cases a site is put °n the NPL after a state agency's lengthy and unsuccessful attempts to get the responsible parties at the site to do the clean up. At that point the EPA is brought in to act as an enforcer to try to get the responsible parties to pay. If that does not happen, then the site will usually be remediated by Using money from the Federal Trust Fund. This is an option that will not exist if the appropriations from Congress are reduced dramatically. Other federal programs will address Superfund 8ites- RCRA and Mega-Sites ^ the last few years, EPA has added an average of 35 non-fed-eral sites to the NPL a year (Stevens, 2004). This might seem Srriall compared to the number of existing sites but in an inter-view, Randy Dietz (2004), an EPA Superfund Program liaison, explained that more of the newly found sites put on the NPL are sites with massive cleanup costs. These sites are categorized as any with an expected total clean up cost of $50 Million or more, known as "mega-sites". These mega-sites Pose new and complex problems. In most cases a site this size ^ot only requires millions of dollars to remediate, but the Process takes years to complete, sometimes up to two to four decades, regardless the amount of money available (Loehr, 004). Another problem is that when Superfund began, it °cused on completing all the less expensive and more basic Sltes. Now after 24 years, a large majority of the complex and Very expensive sites are left to be slowly cleaned up. It would be financially impossible for the EPA to list more than a few °r these mega sites on the NPL at a time. Fewer sites are being completed annually for these reasons. An article published in Resources for the Future (Probst, 004), describes two types of problematic mega-sites. The lrst type contains contaminated sediments and other condonation created by mining operations. The Hudson River °hchlorinated Biphenyls (PCB) site is a perfect example, ^os are mixtures of man-made chemicals with similar cherriical structures (EPA, 2004). The remediation costs assorted with such a site are estimated in the hundreds of mil- lions of dollars. Even the determination of a cleanup method for a site like the Hudson River can be highly controversial. Overseeing cleanup paid for by responsible parties at a mega-site is in itself a costly endeavor. Contaminated sediment and mining sites tend to cover large areas and are enormously expensive to cleanup. At mining sites on the NPL, EPA experience indicates that responsible parties usually go bankrupt or fail to cooperate with the government. As a result of many delinquent mining businesses, mining sites are much more likely to be paid for with public funds than other sites. From 1992 through 2000, responsible parties paid for 70 % of cleanups at non-federal NPL sites. For mining sites this proportion was reversed, with EPA paying the bill for over 60 % of cleanup actions, and responsible parties paying for only 40 % (Probst, 2004). The Critics' Arguments Critics of the Superfund have dissimilar opinions concerning the future of the program. More than anything they differ on what is causing the debate over Superfund's future. Grant Cope (2003), a Staff Attorney at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), in Washington, D.C. gives credit to the EPA for pushing the "polluter pays" program in the late 80s and early 90s, and for successfully completing remediation of 1,400 sites. However, he now criticizes the Bush administration for slowing down the pace of cleanups by 50 % and weakening the polluter pays principle. He cites statistics that annual site completion averages have dropped from 87 cleanups in the 1990s to 47 cleanups in the last few years. Cope puts the blame for the dwindling numbers on the current administration: The Bush administration attempts to shift the blame for this slowdown by saying that the program is now cleaning up more difficult sites. This is implausible for three reasons. First, in 2000, EPA estimated that it would clean up 85 sites per year through 2002, based on timely information about the types of sites in the program. Second, the Resources for the Future report concluded that the vast majority of sites that EPA will clean up in the future would be similar to sites that the agency has years of experience remediating. Third, recent data on the dwindling amount of money in the program provides a far more plausible explanation (Cope, 2003, p. 38). Cope explains how Congress commissioned Resources for the Future (RFF) to write a report outlining the future financial needs of the program. He accuses the administration of under-funding the program by $1-1.4 billion, compared to the estimate of needed funding given by the RFF for 2001 to 2003. Cope strongly urges the Bush administration to replenish the Superfund Trust Fund, stating that it allows the program to clean up sites when there are no viable parties, or when polluters refuse to take responsibility. He feels that the only way to rebuild the Trust Fund is to reauthorize the Superfund taxes. The taxes expired in 1995 and he blames the Bush 47 |