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Saturday, December 17, 2011
Environment - NY's highest court rules on how clean is clean
From the Dec. 15th NY Times, Mireya Navarro reports in a story headed "Court of Appeals Rules That State Can Seek Full Cleanup of Superfund Sites" that begins:
In a decision affecting some of New York’s most toxic sites, the Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that state environmental regulators could seek to require companies responsible for the pollution to restore the areas to the condition they were in before the contamination occurred.Here is the 12/15/11, 20-page opinion in In the Matter of New York State Superfund Coalition, Inc. v. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, et al.At the heart of the case was the question of how clean is clean enough under the state’s Superfund program, which oversees the cleanup of landfills, rivers and former industrial places where toxic chemicals were disposed of or stored.
A coalition of companies that own some of the properties sued the state in 2007, arguing that the Department of Environmental Conservation had the authority only to require the removal of “significant” environmental threats, not to mandate a cleanup that restored a site to its pre-industrial condition.
But in its 5-to-2 decision, the Court of Appeals said that the conservation department “did not exceed its authority or act contrary to law” in enforcing a regulation meant to remove existing or potential hazards that pose a significant threat or imminent danger of irreversible damage to the environment.
Under the regulation, department officials can call for restoration of contaminated sites to “pre-disposal conditions to the extent feasible.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 17, 2011 09:21 AM
Posted to Environment