Aug. 1, 2001 (UPI) -- The Superfund Trust Fund is running out of cash. The special taxes on petroleum, chemicals and businesses that have been the major funding source for Superfund cleanups expired in 1995.

Since then, the fund, used to clean up abandoned, spilled or dumped hazardous substances has continued to shrink and Congress has had to use more general revenue money each year to pay for the 20-year-old program.

In 2000, general revenue funding paid for $700 million of the annual $1.5 billion cost. About a billion dollars from the now-expired special taxes will remain in the trust fund by the end of 2001.

Since 1980, the Hazardous Waste Superfund program, administered by the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, has inspected 41,000 locations. Each year the office conducts about 300 emergency or urgent removal operations, accounting for about 13 percent of the budget.

But the big focus of attention has been the 1,468 heavily contaminated sites around the country that have ended up on Superfund's National Priority List. Of these, 233 have been deemed completely cleaned up and taken off the list. Another 540 are labeled construction complete, meaning measures are in place to contain the toxic materials, operations, such as flushing an aquifer for 20 or 30 years with pumps, have started and all the machinery is in place and operating. Almost all Superfund sites have contaminated groundwater under them.

There are 1,235 sites on the NPL. The head of EPA's Superfund effort, Michael Shapiro, told United Press International that each year about 65 to 85 sites are completed, mostly added to the construction-complete list, while 30 to 40 new sites are added to the list.

"The biggest challenge we have is to continue to make progress on the sites on the NPL, even though we have completed construction on over half of them, there's the remaining almost half of the sites where we need to do further work to either figure out the appropriate remedy or to complete construction," Shapiro told UPI.

Cleanup costs at a site can quickly run to $10 million or $20 million and there are 114 sites where costs are projected to run more than $50 million each.

A recent $500,000 congressionally mandated study by the policy research group Resources for the Future estimates Superfund cleanup costs will total $15 billion over the next decade, with somewhere between 230 and 490 sites being added to the NPL during that time.

States are not particularly anxious to take on the financial responsibility associated with massive cleanups, Shapiro told UPI.

"The impression we have from talking to a lot of our counterparts at the state agencies is that most states, if not all, would have difficulty, given their current level of funding, supporting the larger more complicated kinds of projects that we can encounter in the Superfund project," he said.

Superfund has been controversial for most of its two decades. Critics have blasted the extensive litigation that surrounded many cleanups. Environmental groups are critical of the Superfund trend to contain toxic materials rather than haul them away to more secure hazardous waste dumps. The program has been attacked for inefficiency and Congress cut the legs out from under it in 1995 by terminating the tax that funded it.

Karen Florini, an attorney with Environmental Defense, said the increasing Superfund tendency toward containment at a site rather than removal poses long-term problems.

"What happens after 20 years when people forget it's there? Deed restrictions and deed notices aren't necessarily all that effective. There was a deed notice on the Love Canal site," Florini told UPI. Love Canal, thought of by many as the disaster that provided the 1970's impetus for Superfund, was a community that had been built on a toxic landfill site.

The original Superfund concept was that there would be three taxes -- one on petroleum, one on chemicals and one on corporations. Petroleum was taxed at about 10 cents a barrel, adding about two-tenths of a penny per gallon of gasoline at the pump. Chemicals were taxed anywhere from 25 cents to $5 a ton and an environmental tax, which started in 1986, was about $1 per $1,000 profit, applied to corporations making more than $2 million a year.

This combination of taxes generated about $1 billion a year, 70 percent of Superfund revenues. The remaining 30 percent came from recovered costs, interest and advances, including 13 percent from the general fund.

Superfund's powerful enforcement authority has resulted in about 70 percent of the sites it supervises being cleaned up by the responsible parties. However, no estimate from EPA was available as to how much of the total cleanup costs this might represent, since corporations that do their own cleanup are not required to report their costs.

The two big Superfund fights that loom in Congress are the issues of funding and liability.

Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., a member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public works, shared his thoughts on renewing the taxes with UPI.

"In general, I'm not for raising taxes, but we're going to be into the general fund almost 100 percent within two to three years and I think that's a dangerous way to do this. I'd like to see some ongoing polluters-pay concept in at least a revenue raising manner. Hopefully we'll be able to get that back on the agenda next year," Corzine said.

Corzine said there was bipartisan concern about the way liability could fall on some small business owners, a thought shared by Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., the ranking Republican on the committee.

A spokesman for Smith told UPI about the senator's point of view on liability.

"A number of even small, mom-and-pop type shops, service stations, auto dealers, would send their used oil to a properly licensed facility. They basically did what they were told to do. Several years later it turns out that the site is contaminated and EPA comes after them to pay for the cleanup. Even the very small quantity folks, because the liability structure of the EPA allows them to go after people who even did what they were told to do and what they did in a responsible and legal form. That's one of the liability problems that we have with it," Smith's spokesman said.

But this concern is not realistic for the most part, Florini said.

"It's not mostly mom-and-pop operations. EPA very seldom, if ever, goes after mom and pop who just dumped waste off at a site. Sometimes they go after mom-and-pop operators who owned a site and made an hellacious mess out of it, but those aren't the controversial cases."

The small operations are not sued by EPA, Florini said, but they are sued by big companies who were sued by EPA and turned around and "sued everybody in the phone book."

The Senate recently unanimously passed brownfields legislation designed to aid cleanup of underused or abandoned industrial and commercial sites. But it remains to be seen if the bipartisan spirit will extend to revitalizing Superfund.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.