EPA: Cleanup program needs more, but smarter, funding

The Environmental Protection Agency program that cleans up contaminated sites across the country must be overhauled when the law is reauthorized, an agency official told Congress Thursday.

Mathy Stanislaus, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, told Congress the agency doesn’t merely want more money to throw at the Brownfields Program. Instead, he said, lawmakers need to enable the EPA to take on more projects in more communities.

Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s environment and the economy subcommittee suggested one way to improve the program is increasing the ceiling for local grants. Stanislaus said that might not be the best plan.

“We’ve supported a modest increase, but there is a risk of impacting less communities based on how much we increase the size of these cleanup grants,” Stanislaus said.

“We could actually reduce the amount of communities that receive grants and the leveraging of those monies from the private sector by up to 60 percent, so up to 60 percent of communities may not be getting grants on a yearly basis if all we do is increase the size of grants.”

The Brownfields Program provides funding and EPA assistance to local communities trying to clean up sites that are polluted to such an extent that it complicates or prohibits future development. The EPA estimates there are 450,000 brownfields in the country.

Since becoming law in 2002, the Brownfields Program has been widely supported. Rep. John Shikmus, R-Ill., said the program needs to be examined by Congress and reauthorized, which has never happened since its passage.

“It’s something we can do,” Shikmus said. “We’ve gotta get these old sites reclaimed and back in use.”

Some of the ideas for reforming the program suggested on Thursday included expanding eligibility for the program, reducing liability for local municipalities that want to clean up a contaminated site, and increasing the amount of money given to local government in EPA grants.

Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said the EPA has been running the Brownfields Program effectively since 2002 but has seen funding decline in recent years. He said increasing the amount of funding for the program is a necessary step.

“We can’t continue to expect the same success from a program that is underfunded and lacking the necessary tools to be effective,” he said.

However, Stanislaus said the main issue is that the EPA needs to be able to accept more sites into the program, which would allow state and local authorities to leverage more private investment to help clean up and redevelop the sites.

Stanislaus said that every dollar the EPA invests leverages about $18 from the private sector. The EPA currently can only fund about one-quarter of the applications it receives and, in the last five years, the agency has turned down more than 1,700 projects that could have qualified. There simply wasn’t the money to take them on, he said.

If the EPA were able to take on those projects, the agency estimates more than 50,000 jobs would have been created and more than $12 billion in public and private financing would have been raised for the new sites.

“The unmet need for Brownfields funding from local communities to address abandoned and contaminated sites continues to rise,” he said. “The demand for Brownfields funding far exceeds Brownfields Program funding levels.”

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