The Policy Advisory Committee has confronted and made substantive recommendations on:

• use of site-specific risk assessments;
• evaluation of ecological risks;
• technical assistance which will enable small business and others to get help with a very technical, time-consuming and expensive process;
• enhanced public participation;
• greater assurance about the quality of independent cleanups;
• greater assurance of success for institutional and engineering controls (measures to protect humans and the environment from hazardous substances left at a site);
• increased initiatives for areawide or so-called "brownfields" sites (historically contaminated and underutilized property) to re-enter the market as productive, usable, tax revenue producing and economically restored property;
• more readable and understandable regulations reflecting the real world of cleanups under the Model Toxics Control Act;
• a menu of options to address and hopefully resolve disputes with Ecology more quickly and cheaply;
• a short- and long-term strategy for dealing with the most prevalent contamination -- petroleum.

The recommendations will require both legislation and rule-making, along with some additional issuance of guidance from Ecology. The legislative recommendations are targeted and do not reflect wide-sweeping program changes. Recommendations for statutory change are succinctly compiled in Section 4.0 and include the following areas:

• areawide contamination/brownfields
• enhanced technical assistance
• tax policy
• public participation and community involvement
• plume clause
• transferability of covenants not to sue
• release reporting

The committee's goal was a budget-neutral set of recommendations. This set of recommendations comes close. The costs of implementing most of the recommendations are recoverable from liable parties, but a few are not. The PAC respects the difficult fiscal session being faced by the Legislature, and believes there is potential for shifting some Ecology priorities and current funding directions. In the interim, the group urges implementation of the recommendations. The additional revenue requirement is expected to be approximately $700,000 for the biennium. Most of that goes to the effort to simplify and increase program accountability. The result is believed to be a net economic benefit to the state.

Return to Table of Contents