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While our government agencies claim this amendment to the Fox River PCB Clean-up Record of Decision (ROD) is based on science, it is actually based on political expediency and the desires of the polluting corporations, who clearly wanted the following things:

1.  A cheaper clean-up through capping and reduced dredging

The corporations achieved this goal in the final ROD and new ROD amendments.   Also, by manipulating public opinion and Brown County political leaders to quietly block the Town of Holland landfill site, which was to be THE major site for nearby, economically viable, dredge spoil disposal.  The polluters will save $190 million when compared with the previous, stronger clean-up plan.

The corporations achieved this goal in new ROD amendments which specify that "clean" dredge spoils from the shipping channel can be used as capping materials.   Because the current annual dredging rate is too slow to generate the quantity of sand needed for the caps, the ROD amendment will require the digging of a deeper channel.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will dig deeper and the Brown County Harbor Commission will get a FREE disposal site for the spoils, a benefit worth millions of dollars, with the added benefit of no future maintenance or liability at the capping disposal site.  The deeper channel and free sediment disposal will lower shipping costs for the corporations.  (.... never mind that these channel spoils are contaminated, or that the material will soon erode downstream to refill the shipping channel.) 

The Brown County Harbor Commission appears to have cut a deal with the corporations.  The Commission flatly refuses to request that Renard Isle remediation be made part of the Fox River cleanup (with the polluters covering a major portion of the costs) and, in exchange, the Commission will get the deeper shipping channel they wanted.  (For years, the Brown County Harbor Commission has been unable to get federal funds for a deeper channel.)  This means Brown County taxpayers will get stuck with millions of dollars of capping, remediation and repairs at Renard Isle, for hundreds of years into the future, and the corporations are completely off the hook.

The corporations acheived this goal through all versions of the ROD.  The agencies appear to have made an early decision to sacrifice the Bay in exchange for agreement from the corporations on other aspects of the Fox River cleanup.  The agencies refuse to require adequate sampling of the lower Bay to determine the locations of sediment PCB hotspots, and use the lack of data to claim they have no evidence of the need for remediation in the Bay.  The corporations are off the hook and the Bay will take more than 100 years to recover, continuing to damage public health, the economy and wildlife.  (More details)

The corporation achieved this goal by creating intense political pressure for a "voluntary, cooperative approach."  In addition, polluting corporations nationwide have promoted Republicans who in 1995 eliminated the Superfund surcharge on chemical and oil feedstocks which had been the source of the Fund.  Superfund went bankrupt in 2003 and is now funded primarily through annual appropriations of taxpayer money at the federal level, at MUCH lower levels than needed for even minimal cleanups of hazardous waste sites nationwide.  This puts government negotiators in extremely weak bargaining positions, because they can't fall back on the Fund to pay for timely cleanups if they dare to take the polluters to court to force compliance with the law.  Politicians want to appear effective and announce that the cleanup is underway, not face the political embarrassment of a serious cleanup delay due to legal battles.   Without the Fund, those are their only choices.  So the government agencies are forced to severely compromise their cleanup requirements, ignore the science, and allow continued health risks in order to get a voluntary agreement from the polluters for at least SOME cleanup, to satisfy the politicians who control the agencies.

The corporations will acheive this goal through political pressures (see #5 above).  Because the Fox River cleanup is being handled as a "voluntary" cleanup by the polluters (at Gov. Tommy Thompson's and Gov. Jim Doyle's insistence), the agencies will be desperate to get something/anything to finish this cleanup plan, even if it means putting taxpayers at high risk of major liabilities in the future.  The corporations want a final endpoint to their liability, and they are likely to get it by paying a lump sum up-front as their final payment.  [This happened at the Manistique River PCB cleanup in Michigan, where Manistique Paper was allowed to cash-out at the beginning of the clean-up and the EPA discovered too late that the clean-up was going to be MUCH more expensive than they had planned.  Taypayers funds had to be used to finish the job.]

The corporations acheived this goal through major cuts in the monitoring budget in the ROD amendment.  The prior ROD included more than $40 million for long-term monitoring.  This version includes only $8 million for only 40 years, even though the new capping proposals create a huge need for a greatly expanded monitoring budget for CENTURIES into the future.  When the monitoring money runs out, the public will be kept ignorant of whether the cleanup was a success or failure.  (The EPA promises us that the EPA will continue monitoring beyond 40 years, but this would be at public taxpayers' expense.  They are assuming that EPA will still exist 100-200 years from now and that tax funding will be available. It's more likely that the cap monitoring will be quietly defunded and forgotten.)

The corporations achieve this goal through political pressures (see #5 above).  Since George Bush took the Presidency in 2000, the federal government has allowed the state to call all the shots and coddled the corporations.  Prior to 2000, the federal government had taken the lead in promoting a strong NRD restoration program on the Fox River, despite strident opposition from the state and corporations.  State officials argued that any dollars paid by the corporations for NRD projects would take dollars away from sediment cleanup.  Now the state is in charge and is grossly mishandling the NRD program, through misappropriation of restoration dollars to compensate for state budget shortfalls, or serving the local political desires of the corporations.  (More details)

The corporations achieve this goal by dictating which projects will get NRD funding.  For example, Georgia-Pacific Corporation was allowed by the state to misappropriate millions of restoration dollars for several low-priority shoreline recreation projects distributed through communities only in Brown County, where G-P is located.  This allowed G-P to buy goodwill with many local government officials who desperately wanted the money for their pet recreation projects, and ignored wider public needs in other counties along the river and bay.  The local officials didn't realize they were being used and cheated in the long run, because G-P was allowed to settle its NRD liability for only a small fraction of what it truly owed the public.  Instead, G-P appears generous.

The corporations achieve this goal through the ROD amendment, by spreading a blanket of sand or anchored caps over the most contaminated areas of the river.  Short-term monitoring may show a dramatic drop in PCB contamination of fish over a 10 year period, allowing the corporations and politicians to declare victory.  But as the caps erode away, as they surely will, the PCB levels will rise again.  A major storm could cause higher PCB levels very quickly.  The corporations are gambling that such a storm won't happen anytime soon.

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