Funds would be super

Los Angeles Times: For several years, the infamous Love Canal has been about as clean as it's going to get. The houses adjacent to the upstate New York site have found new buyers more than two decades after toxic chemicals dumped there by industry after World War II seeped into houses and a school, leading to the creation of the Superfund to clean up this and other badly contaminated sites across the nation. The Love Canal toxins have long been capped and vented; all that remains is continued monitoring.
The Environmental Protection Agency now proposes taking Love Canal off the Superfund list -- a successful cleanup, rightly paid for by polluter Hooker Chemical Co. (now Occidental Chemical Corp.) and a feather in the EPA's cap. The question is how many more success stories the Superfund can produce.
As with Love Canal, a majority of the current 1,200 Superfund cleanups are funded under the "polluter pays" principle. But a trust fund for "orphan sites," where it's hard to pin down a responsible party, has run out of money after Congress allowed an excise tax on oil and chemical companies to expire in 1995. Now those cleanups are paid for by taxpayers out of general revenues.
Little help
The Bush administration didn't create this problem, but it hasn't done much to help either. Unlike the Clinton administration, it has not proposed bringing back the excise tax. Instead, it has used the excuse of less funding to propose adding fewer sites to the list.
Legislation by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to renew the excise tax until 2014 has been languishing in committee for a year. Congress should pull it from obscurity and get it passed, with or without the president's help.
Nor should the lack of money keep the EPA from adding new noxious sites to the Superfund roster. It is impossible to gauge how badly the nation is falling behind the intent of the original Superfund law without knowing how many poisoned sites still threaten communities. The sickened residents of Love Canal were forced to fight with authorities as well as industry to recognize their plight; no neighborhood should have to do that again.