If the Bush Administration's laissez-faire approach to the environment serves as an indicator, most attempts to save the federal waste-cleanup cache known as Superfund -- such as a bill introduced last month by US Senator Lincoln Chafee -- will likely fall on deaf ears.

But the Rhode Island Republican isn't giving up. "There's still a glimmer of hope," Chafee says from his Washington office. "If not this year, then next. We'll start now, and we'll probably have to keep on working."

Ratified in 1980, Superfund (originally the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act) was launched during the waning months of Jimmy Carter's presidency, partly as a response to the infamous, toxic-seepage disaster at Love Canal, near Niagra Falls.

The fund's "polluter pays" concept was simple: The company that makes the mess cleans it up. If the company refuses, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does the work and sues the offender -- for triple the cleanup cost. For sites created by companies that no longer exist, a tax is levied on oil, chemical, and other companies.

This model, while at times not the most efficient, maintained inflows of about $1 billion each year -- until 1995, when a Republican-controlled Congress halted the tax on oil and chemical companies, which claimed it was unfair to punish them for the sins of others. At that time, the Superfund totaled $3.8 billion. By this October, it could sink as low as $28 million. By 2004, according to some estimates, it will disappear. And as the New York Times reported on Monday, July 1, because the clean-up fund is hundreds of millions of dollars short of the money needed to operate the program, the Bush administration has identified 33 toxic waste sites in18 states for cuts in Superfund financing.

Chafee's bill would resurrect the tax on oil and chemical companies. In proposing it, he knows he's joining an already long list of misfires.

For four years, President Bill Clinton failed to convince Congress to reinstate the industry tax. Earlier this year, US Senator Robert Torricelli, a Democrat from New Jersey (which has 111Superfund sites -- the most of any state -- compared to 96 in California and 12 in Rhode Island), unsuccessfully tried to tack a resurrection measure onto the Senate energy bill.

Since then, the Bush administration has implied it will do little to help resuscitate the tax; it also has removed some sites from Superfund's list of top priorities, claiming the EPA is shouldering more expensive "mega-sites" now than in years past.

"It's a national balancing act," said Alice Kaufman, an EPA spokeswoman in Boston. "We have to acknowledge that it's not hurting people in Rhode Island to shift the priority to places like Libby, Montana," where asbestos from a local mine could be responsible for hundreds of illnesses and deaths.

Although local environmentalists might argue, Kaufman says Rhode Island's Superfund sites aren't in much danger of halted cleanups. EPA workers have left the scene of a contaminated section of the Woonasquatucket River, near a Centerdale nursing home, and their job is complete, save for follow-up soil tests in a few years. At many of the state's other sites, companies are cleaning up their own messes.

Yet supervising these cleanups, or monitoring a site after cleanup, still costs the EPA, and without a Superfund, average taxpayers increasingly will bear this burden. According to a recent study by the Public Interest Research Group, taxes will underwrite more than half of the Superfund budget in 2003, compared with only 18 percent in 1995.

"The Superfund has worked. Why would we want to change that?" asks Chafee. "We don't want to wait until . . . people get sick, and there's no money in the fund, for everyone to wake up and take notice."

Issue Date: July 5 - 11, 2002