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State environmental officials claim their voluntary cleanup program is a success. More accurate is this description from an environmental advocate: “The kind of program only a hardcore polluter could love.”
As Dan Stockman’s story on Page 1A explains, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s Voluntary Remediation Program, intended to encourage voluntary cleanup of contaminated sites, is instead allowing polluters to avoid responsibility, delaying cleanup and keeping neighbors in the dark about contamination.
Polluters are given deadlines, but those deadlines are often ignored. And there are no consequences and no enforcement even when deadlines are blown by months or even years.
Almost nine out of 10 sites are past the six-month deadline for submitting such plans. Many of the companies past the deadline for submitting cleanup plans are more than four years over the deadline. IDEM has only ejected 20 of the nearly 600 sites that entered the program.
State officials need to enforce deadlines with penalties when they are missed. They should restructure the program to make notifying neighbors of contamination an early step that polluting companies must take to be eligible for the voluntary program. Now, notification is delayed until after the cleanup plan is approved – which can take four years or longer.
The benefits of a voluntary program are lost when environmental management officials allow companies to drag their feet and delay cleanup beyond reasonable limits. The program will continue to fail without stricter enforcement.
