Summary
The best reason for renewing the Superfund trust fund is no farther away than Plymouth, where a 15-year attempt to clean up an old oil waste site has led to lengthy, costly negotiations to recover cleanup costs from hundreds of businesses and organizations in Maine. The Senate today is expected to vote on an amendment to create a more certain flow of cash to Superfund, which is now relying entirely on general revenues. Maine's senators should support the measure to relieve the burden on these businesses and make Superfund a more effective program.
Superfund, created in 1980, established three ways to pay for the cost of cleaning up polluted sites. If the company causing the pollution was still in business, it would pay. If the company could not, then the Environmental Protection Agency would clean it up and look for other parties who contributed to the pollution to recoup some or all of the money. Where neither of these options existed, a trust fund, paid by oil, chemical and related industries, would pay for what became known as the "orphan share." Collections for that trust fund expired in 1995 and have not been reauthorized. Without it, general tax funds rather than what are essentially user fees have increasingly been put toward cleanups even as the total available money has diminished. The trust fund itself was expected to run out of money this year.See the full content of this document
Extract
Re-Funding Superfund
An amendment to the budget resolution before the Senate would create a revenue stream, presumab...
See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
