Browner Testifies on Boehlert Superfund Bill

A House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee the week of May 9 heard U.S. EPA Director Carol M. Browner's testimony on the Administration's view of a bipartisan Superfund bill introduced in April by Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), the subcommittee's chairman.

The same week, U.S. Senators John Chafee (R-RI) and Robert Smith (R-NH) drafted an upper house Superfund bill, also designed to capture bipartisan support.

Browner called the Boehlert bill, The Recycle America's Land Act, H.R. 1300, a good-faith effort, but she opposed some of the liability relief the bill would grant. (She has not testified on the Chafee-Smith proposal, which has yet to be introduced, but the Clinton Administration has opposed any reauthorization of Superfund denuded of taxes.)

Both proposals focus liability relief on selected potentially responsible parties, such as generators of small amounts of waste at a given site. The Senate draft also calls for so-called "fair share" allocation of cleanup costs among PRPs, irrespective of joint and several liabilities.

However, both measures are said to fall short of the comprehensive liability reforms sought by risk managers and insurers in the early 1990s. Neither proposal, for example, would repeal Superfund's applying retroactive liability for cleanup of waste sites in use before the Superfund took effect in 1980.

Other sections of both proposed bills—although not congruently—consider the redevelopment of Brownfields and funding of the program. Regarding the latter, the Boehlert bill would reinstate special Superfund taxes; the Senate proposal would not.

Crain Communications's Business Insurance solicited opinions of the bill, including those of Lance Ewing, chair of RIMS External Affairs Team and director-insurance and loss prevention for GES Exposition Services Inc. in Las Vegas. It reported Ewing as saying the bills offered "a window to offer solid defense for any contributory causation or to pay their fair share under the allocation system.

"Risk managers, however, must continue to review their old insurance policies to see if they are covered and prepare to battle not only EPA but their old insurers as well."