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IDEM Again in News for Flawed Cleanup Program

Jul 15, 2007

Study: Voluntary cleanup program filled with flaws
Newspaper investigation shows most sites behind on environmental remediation plans.

By The Associated Press

Indiana's voluntary environmental cleanup program was intended to handle polluted sites efficiently and avoid litigation, but instead it has been marked by delays, long cleanups and poor communication.

The state Department of Environmental Management's Voluntary Remediation Program began in 1993 as a way to speed property transactions. Businesses selling polluted land could enter the program to avoid a forced cleanup.

There are 353 active sites in the program. But an analysis by The (Fort Wayne) Journal Gazette found several flaws.

Among the newspaper'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 plan in three years or more. The average is more than four years.

-For sites with cleanup plans, it took the state an average of 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.

"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."

But Bill Holland, the senior environmental manager for the program, said the program is a success. It cleans hundreds of sites that otherwise might never be found."If you come in voluntarily, we didn't know you existed," Holland said.

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.

"(The program) has helped, but it appears there's not enough resources or finances to keep up with the job," said Linda Lee, a Purdue professor of environmental chemistry and soil science and associate director of the Center for the Environment who has worked with IDEM on sites in the program. "It's really frustrating."