Consent decree a public policy boondoggle

by Steve Higgs

Time has shown the mayor should have kept her finger to herself. The only thing the consent decree's local control has protected us from is the consent decree itself. It's cost Bloomington residents nearly $6 million in excess water bills. And in the end, EPA is forcing a cleanup plan on us anyway. Negotiated in 1985 between Westinghouse, EPA, the city, the county and the state, the consent decree called for Westinghouse to excavate decades-old landfills filled with PCB-contaminated materials and build an incinerator to burn them.

The first-of-its-kind in the world, the incinerator would have been fueled by burning municipal trash. Outraged citizens quickly proved that would have been an environmental disaster in and of itself, sure to produce deadly dioxins and furans during the combustion process.

The incinerator was abandoned in the face of overwhelming public opposition, 10 years after it was proposed. There's never been anything of the kind discussed anywhere outside Bloomington.

The consent decree did give local officials significant input into how the cleanup would proceed and how the incinerator would be built and operated. And there are those who argue that those provisions empowered the public and local officials to kill the incinerator.

Nonsense. If it weren't for the consent decree, such a ridiculous machine never would have been approved to begin with.

And there would have been just as much opportunity for citizens to stop the incinerator without the consent decree, maybe more. Had EPA been running the show, the people would have had a place at the table instead of being forced to shout through the door.

Perhaps the consent decree's greatest failure was that it required all five consent decree parties to agree on any cleanup plan other than the incinerator. The only proposal put on the table that offered any safety to the public ­ environmental vaults ­ was made at a little-noticed, one-night presentation in the Monroe County Courthouse, sponsored by incinerator opponents. The theory was that since there was no real solution to Bloomington's problem, the PCBs should be excavated and stored in environmentally secure structures until an acceptable cleanup technology was identified.

Environmental vaults were not taken seriously because Westinghouse would have vetoed them.

The next-best solution would have been be a state-of-the-art landfill for the PCBs, an environmental vault made of soil and clay rather than steel and concrete. Such a facility proposed by Westinghouse for incinerator ash proved the incinerator's ultimate undoing. No one would have dared suggest a PCB landfill.

The upshot: Mayor Allison's consent decree has been a public policy boondoggle, whose effect has been environmental gridlock. For more than a decade, the vast majority of PCBs remained where they'd been since the 1960s, leaching here and there into our air and water and wildlife, insidiously infiltrating our bodies and our children's bodies, doing damage that we're only beginning to comprehend. Finally, in 1995, Allison stepped down, and John Fernandez was elected mayor. He vowed to bring this sad saga to a close and got the ear of the federal judge overseeing the consent decree, who agreed.

The result, however, is as if the consent decree doesn't exist. EPA and Westinghouse are deciding how the cleanup is going to be done, even though the Monroe County Commissioners ­ one of the five consent decree parties -- don't agree.

The commissioners may or may not be right. But it appears that they do not have the same veto power that Westinghouse enjoyed under the consent decree. Where's the local control?