TAX NEWS - June 2010

Superfund tax debated in Senate subcommittee hearing

WASHINGTON — Sen. Jim Inhofe sparred Tuesday with a New Jersey colleague over whether taxes should be imposed on some corporations to pay for cleaning up the nation's most hazardous polluted sites.
 
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said at an Environment and Public Works subcommittee hearing that more money would speed the cleanup of sites on the National Priority List, also known as Superfund sites.

Lautenberg is sponsoring legislation that would reinstate the taxes on chemical and energy companies and certain other corporations that expired in 1995 to pay for Superfund site restoration.

Since the tax expired, Lautenberg said, the pace has slowed from about 80 cleanups per year to 20.

"When we had more money, we cleaned up more sites," he said.

Mathy Stanislaus, an assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, agreed that more resources were needed, though he said the pace of cleanups has slowed in part because the sites being worked on now are more complex.

The Obama administration supports reinstating the tax. In recent years, general tax revenue has been used to supplement the money collected from those that actually caused the pollution.

But Inhofe, R-Tulsa, said 70 percent of Superfund site cleanup costs are being paid by the polluters and that reinstating the tax would hurt small businesses.

Besides a varying tax on chemicals and a 9.7 cents tax per barrel of crude oil, the proposal includes a more general business tax of 0.12 percent above a certain threshold of taxable income.

"In other words, the Superfund tax is also a small business tax," Inhofe said. There would be no relationship between those being taxed and those responsible for the pollution, he said.

John B. Stephenson, with the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, said there were 1,269 sites on the National Priority List last year, and there are 75 sites around the country that have unacceptable human exposure. At the current cleanup pace, he said, 41 of those will still have that exposure in 2015.

Last year, he said, the EPA received nearly $1.3 billion for the Superfund program, which Stephenson said the EPA spread too thinly among all the sites "to make everybody happy."

Having more money dedicated to the cleanup, he said, would mean "quicker, more efficient, less costly" cleanups.

Oklahoma has had 14 sites on the National Priority List. Though a few have been deleted, others are still somewhere in the cleanup process. The worst site, Tar Creek, which was polluted by decades of mining that left huge piles of chat near residences and water in northeastern Oklahoma, has been a major focus of Inhofe and other officials in recent years.