Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [49]
IN THE PHOTO hanging behind his executive desk, a tanned, wiry, George Spadoro is dwarfed by a ruddy, pudgy Bill Clinton. Like Clinton, the Democratic mayor of Edison can be a one-question interview. Ask one, you get a disquisition. Spadoro began his career with hazardous waste. Just out of law school, he was working pro bono with a group cleaning up the infamous Kin-Buc waste dump—a regional chemical slop-pit on the banks of the Raritan River.
At ninety words a minute, Spadoro described getting Kin-Buc on the Superfund Priorities List, and the importance of the containment bulkheads that now keep PCBs out of the Raritan River, and the on-site treatment plant that pumps leachate out of clean water and back into the ground. “Kin-Buc is a Superfund success. Now we are building an esplanade there. A park on the river. It’s a cleanup site that returned to its proper use.”
Spadoro explained that there were “RP’s” at Kin-Buc—responsible parties the feds could bill for the cleanup. Waste Management, Inc., paid $100 million to restore that site. But Arnold Livingston is dead, and so the Edison dump is an “orphan site.” Cleanup of orphan sites was paid for by the Superfund Trust, which was in turn funded by a tax on the chemical industry. New Jersey townships can’t take on these huge cleanups, said Spadoro. They’re even too big for the states. Only the federal government has the money and muscle for projects this size.
The Superfund tax had been in place since Jimmy Carter signed it into law in 1980. In 1995 it was was killed as part of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” Bill Clinton tried twice but couldn’t get the Republican Congress to reinstate the tax. Even if it was expensive, the Superfund Trust is what Texans call “good bidness.” The chemical industry had used the nation’s wetlands as a hazardous-waste dump for decades. Then the industry was billed to clean up the mess it left behind, and for fifteen years, it worked fine. Of course, it worked slowly. Initially, the oil industry, also responsible for much of the toxic dumping, was to have been included in the tax, but big oil has so much clout it muscled its way out of the tax by threatening to kill the whole program if it was included.
In 1995, when the Republicans killed it, the Superfund Trust had $3.3 billion left in it and bills coming due. By 2002 it was down to $100 million. Superfund, in other words, is no longer a fund. Bush could have picked up some easy environmental points on this one, but both he and Christine Whitman oppose reinstating the tax.
Reporters who covered his campaign in 2000 asked the wrong questions. Bush has a chemical-dependency problem, but it’s not cocaine. It’s Monsanto, Dow, and Union Carbide. They wrote the checks that put him in the Texas governor’s mansion. During Bush’s final legislative session, his staff passed an ersatz environmental bill designed to “make Bush green.” It was written by an industry lobbyist, and the green turned out to be oil- and chemical-industry money. The voluntary emissions-control bill was a spectacular failure. No one volunteered, and toxic emissions were not reduced. The Texas Legislature canned the thing in its first post-Bush session.
In 2002 Christine Whitman announced her solution for the dwindling cleanup fund. She defunded eighty-nine Superfund sites in thirteen states. One of them sits in Gail Horvath’s backyard. It would cost $60 million to remove the rubber cap and dig up the contaminated soil there, more than half the money left in the trust. The United States government is not, obviously, a responsible party.
“For us, this is the second time around,” said Spiegel. When Whitman