By David Cruz
Correspondent
Democratic lawmakers gathered at the site of the old E.C. Electroplating factory in Garfield to A. celebrate the successful start to remediation of this superfund site and B. call for a more stable funding source for the federal program to cover so-called “orphan sites,” like this one.
“When the Superfund program was created back in 1980, funding for the orphaned sites came from a diverse array of sources, including, and importantly, taxes collected on crude oil and certain chemicals,” noted Sen. Cory Booker. “However, the tax program for the superfund site expired 20 years ago in 1995.”
Meaning that the cost for cleanup of sites like this one – E C went out of business more than decade ago – falls to taxpayers. So Booker and Senator Bob Menendez, along with House members Bill Pascrell and Frank Pallone will introduce The Superfund Polluter Pays Restoration Act, which would reinstate the excize tax on polluting industries and give the EPA ongoing funding no subject to annual appropriations.
“It just seems to me fundamentally wrong that the taxpayers have to pay for the companies that polluted and left a legacy of failure behind for everybody else to clean up,” added Sen. Bob Menendez, “and everybody else to pay, instead of those who created the pollution in the first pace.”
New Jersey has more than a hundred active superfund sites, more than any other state in the country, a toxic legacy of our industrial past. It’s seeped into local groundwater and into rivers and streams. Cleaning it up has already cost hundreds of millions of dollars and sites like this one in Garfield are going to take ten of millions more to get fully cleaned up.
“We will need $40 million to do this cleanup, which we would like to begin in 2018 after all the design work is done,” said the EPA’s Region 2 Administrator Judith Enck. “I don’t have $40 million hanging around on my desk and that’s why the legislation that these lawmakers talked about today … is so crucial.”
Funds to clean up the E C Eloctroplating site are secure through 2017, but once that runs out, they’ll have to go looking for more funds to actually finish the job, and lawmakers acknowledge that getting this bill through the sometimes toxic political environment of the congress could prove to be as difficult as cleaning up the hexavalent chromium that has fouled this neighborhood for decades.
