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Sunday, July 08, 2007

Ind. Gov't. - Indiana’s voluntary environmental cleanup program a failure?

Dan Stockman of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a lengthy report today on the failings of Indiana's voluntary cleanup program. Some quotes:

Indiana’s voluntary environmental cleanup program, intended to handle polluted sites quickly and efficiently without courts and lawsuits, is instead marked by delays, years-long cleanups and neighbors kept in the dark about the polluted soil and water nearby.

Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s Voluntary Remediation Program was started in 1993 as a way to speed property transactions: Businesses wanting to sell polluted land could enter a voluntary program to clean up the contamination and avoid a forced cleanup.

But a Journal Gazette analysis of the program shows that some cleanups take so long it appears companies are instead using the program to avoid any cleanup at all. There are 353 active sites in the program, including 35 in northeast Indiana. Seventeen of those are in Fort Wayne and New Haven. * * *

“Voluntary programs as an alternative to regulations – there’s not much of a track record that shows it works for the environment,” said Rebecca Stanfield, state director of the citizen environmental advocacy group Environment Illinois. “It may work as a way of having a program that is ostensibly there to address the problem, but study after study shows voluntary programs don’t work to clean up pollution.”

Among The Journal Gazette’s findings:

• Nearly nine of 10 active sites are past the six-month deadline for submitting a cleanup plan.

• Nearly two-thirds of those past the deadline have not submitted a cleanup plan in three years or more. The average is more than four years.

• One site, Siemens Electric in Princeton, has been without a cleanup plan for more than 10 years. Thirty-five other sites have been without cleanup plans for more than five years.

• Among sites that do have cleanup plans, it took an average of 22 months for the plan to be submitted. The deadline is six months.

• For sites with cleanup plans, it took IDEM an average 19 months to approve them so work could begin. The review is supposed to take 90 days. Two cleanup plans took more than eight years to approve.

• The backlog of cases within the program has grown every year of its existence but one, and it now stands at 200 cases.

Because of delays found at every step in the program – and because the state does not require polluters to tell their neighbors until they have an approved cleanup plan – residents living near contamination can expect to wait an average of more than four years before they are even told it exists. * * *

Indiana Sen. Beverly Gard, R-Greenfield, said she understands the voluntary cleanup program will be slower than people like because it is voluntary and the state is not forcing polluters to perform.

But the delays uncovered by the newspaper are disturbing, she said, and need to be examined. Gard is chairwoman of the Senate’s Energy and Environmental Affairs Committee and chairwoman of the Environmental Quality Service Council interim study committee. She said the study committee will review IDEM programs this summer and may ask for the voluntary cleanup program to be included in the review.

“IDEM’s understaffed, and they may very well be slow in getting these things done,” Gard said. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

But it should be a surprise to taxpayers, because the companies in the program pay for IDEM’s work.

“Each project is entirely self-funded,” [Bill Holland, the senior environmental manager in IDEM’s Voluntary Remediation Program] said. “They receive bills for review time. … They are paying their own freight.”

And yet, the backlog of sites in the program without an approved cleanup plan has grown every year but one since it started in 1993: By the end of 2006, there were 200 cases in the pipeline. And the logjam can only be expected to grow, since, on average, IDEM moves 22 cases a year while 28 new ones enter.

Here is the state's Voluntary Remediation Program (VRP) main page.

It may be noteworthy that the last report on project statistics is dated Sept. 30, 2003: Project Statistics as of September 30, 2003. The final step marking completion of the cleanup process is the issuance of the Covenant Not to Sue (CNTS). Notice that this report never gives that total -- the closest the report comes is "Covenant Not To Sue stage (in process or issued):" The ILB has heard in the past that getting through this final sign-off stage can take years.

Another link from the main page leads to the VRP Project Site List *updated June 2007*. As noted in the Journal Gazette story, "the state does not require polluters to tell their neighbors until they have an approved cleanup plan."

Participants in the voluntary program are not required to make their contamination public until they have an approved cleanup plan from IDEM.

With an average eight months between application and a signed agreement, an average 22 months before a cleanup plan is submitted and an average 19 months for IDEM to approve the plan, neighbors can expect to wait an average of more than four years before they are told about the pollution near their homes, schools or workplace.

That cleanup plan is known as the VRP. IDEM notes that its "updated June 2007" list does not include sites that have not signed the VRP. Further, the IDEM list does not even include a numerical total for these pre-VRA sites:
All VRP sites are considered confidential until the applicant and IDEM sign the Voluntary Remediation Agreement (VRA) which is a contractual agreement. No work is performed by IDEM on a project until the VRA is executed. Confidential sites do not appear on this list. It should also be noted that terminated and withdrawn sites are not on this list.

The June 2007 site list is available from IDEM only as an Excel document. Further, despite some effort, the ILB has been unable to sort it by "status." There are currently 591 entires on the IDEM list. The ILB has converted the list to html for readers, although without the sorting function, it has limited usefulness (although you can use your browser search).

ILB Note: The Journal Gazette story quotes the head of the IDEM program as stating:

Holland said he was not aware companies were dragging their feet on submitting cleanup plans but acknowledged that when the agency compiled the data for The Journal Gazette that it was the first time it had ever been examined that way.
Given the focus on government metrics in the past few years, that statement, plus the scarcity of information on the IDEM page, is somewhat amazing.

For starts, it would be a good thing if IDEM (or the Fort Wayne paper) would make available the data compiled for today's story.

[More] The J-G also has an editorial today that concludes:

Almost nine out of 10 sites are past the six-month deadline for submitting such plans. Many of the companies past the deadline for submitting cleanup plans are more than four years over the deadline. IDEM has only ejected 20 of the nearly 600 sites that entered the program.

State officials need to enforce deadlines with penalties when they are missed. They should restructure the program to make notifying neighbors of contamination an early step that polluting companies must take to be eligible for the voluntary program. Now, notification is delayed until after the cleanup plan is approved – which can take four years or longer.

The benefits of a voluntary program are lost when environmental management officials allow companies to drag their feet and delay cleanup beyond reasonable limits. The program will continue to fail without stricter enforcement.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 8, 2007 08:27 AM
Posted to Environment | Indiana Government | Indiana economic development