![]() ![]() Gorsuch that the White House's budget prospectus indicated ''it is highly unlikely that this Administration will, in the time available, clean up 400 sites or spend the amount available.'' Cleanup Timetable Sought Michael McCloskey, the Sierra Club's executive director, wrote Mrs. Environmental forces responded, in effect, that simply listing the worst sites purified nobody's dump. Gorsuch released a complete ''national priority list'' of 418 sites identified as having the worst problems. ![]() Last December, as required by the law that established the $1.6 billion fund, Mrs. It said that Administration budget documents had projected a cleanup of 40 toxic waste sites by September 1982, 70 fewer than scheduled back in 1980, in the Carter Administration, but that only four had been dealt with. ![]() In October the Sierra Club, a conservation group, released an analysis of the pace of the agency's cleanup efforts. Gorsuch said that $100 million had been spent on preliminary activities and that $130 million more had been ''earmarked'' for spending. Florio, a New Jersey Democrat and a leading critic of the rate of progress, reported that only $88 million of the $1.6 billion fund had been spent, on a handful of projects. Meanwhile, the agency had taken a few polluters to court and reached multimillion-dollar settlements with others for ''voluntary cleanups.'' Small Part of Fund Spent Gorsuch, declared that the program was ''at cruising speed'' and promulgated an ''interim priority list'' of 160 sites for cleanup. Remedial activities were further complicated when the Reagan Administration, only five months after taking office in 1981, announced that it intended to readjust the program, through such devices as ''reclassifying'' many wastes, to save industry hundreds of millions of dollars.Īmid complaints from environmental organizations that little progress was being made, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne M. The urgency of doing something about situations like the Love Canal chemical dump in upstate New York impelled Congress in 1980 to enact a law authorizing a $1.6 billion fund for cleanup projects. But it was early 1980 before the agency came up with some draft regulations, involving 6,000 pages of background documents alone, and these were immediately beset by protracted litigation. to produce regulations on toxic waste disposal. Congress sought a deadline of April 1978 for the E.P.A. ![]()
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