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•Pacific Western Bank, San Diego, California, Assumes All of the Deposits of Los Padres Bank, Solvang, California
[August 26, 2010]

•Buying Distressed Assets out of Bankruptcy
[August 20, 2010]

•EPA Proposes Rules on Clean Air Act Permitting for Greenhouse Gas Emissions
[August 17, 2010]

•Federal Task Force Sends Recommendations to President on Fostering Clean Coal Technology
[August 17, 2010]

•EPA Rule Increases Protection from Lead-Paint Poisoning
[July 7, 2010]

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News

EPA Embracing Superfund Policy to Expedite Site Cleanups

[February 17, 2010]

EPA’s fiscal year 2011 budget document reveals a major new Superfund policy initiative aimed at increasing the effectiveness of its cleanup programs and better measuring their progress. The effort is called the Integrated Cleanup Initiative (ICI). The EPA initiative involves a multi-year effort addressing more effective uses of assessment and cleanup authorities to impact a greater number of sites, accelerate cleanups, and put those sites back into productive use while protecting human health and the environment. The ICI establishes new performance measures for the Superfund cleanup program. EPA’s FY11 budget document states that the agency completed 20 remedy constructions in 2009 and plans to complete an additional 25 in FY11. In contrast, 97 remedial action projects were completed in FY09 and EPA is establishing a goal of completing an additional 103 in FY11.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is expected to release a detailed report on the program’s funding needs later this year. President Obama is proposing to cut the Superfund program slightly from $1.31 billion in FY10 to $1.29 billion in FY11. The FY11 budget proposal also includes detailed projections for $1.3 billion in new revenue that the agency would receive if Congress reinstates the expired Superfund tax on industry. 

One aspect of ICI is the creation of the new performance measures aimed at tracking EPA’s progress toward cleaning up contaminated sites. In an effort to demonstrate that progress toward cleaning up sites is being made, the new “projects completed measure” will track what in many cases are smaller steps towards cleaning up sites that would not be captured by the “construction completion measure.” The FY11 budget justification introduces for the first time this new measure that will track the number of remedial action “projects” completed at sites appearing on EPA’s National Priorities List for Superfund within a fiscal year. The measure is meant to supplement the existing measure that tracks the number of cleanup sites where construction of the site-wide contamination remedy has been completed. 

Other new measures include EPA for the first time taking credit for Superfund removal actions voluntarily performed by parties potentially responsible for the contamination (PRPs) as opposed those conducted by the agency itself; better leveraging EPA resources across multiple cleanup programs in an effort to accelerate cleanups; and seeking to have the Superfund enforcement office approach PRPs earlier in the Superfund process and compel them to clean up sites on their own rather than have EPA perform the remedial actions.