County, state officials discuss Superfund

Lincoln County commissioners Mike Cole and Mark Peck, along with Asbestos Resource Program manager Nick Raines, traveled to Helena this week to meet with Montana Department of Environmental Quality officials regarding the long-term program to manage exposure to contaminated material left in place after the Environmental Protection Agency pulls up stakes and leaves Libby.

The meetings, according to DEQ’s federal Superfund bureau chief Tom Stoops, were intended to lay the goundwork for the design of the institutional controls to be implemented in Lincoln County once EPA leaves.

“No decisions were made this week,” Stoops said. “We had cordial conversations about what the institutional controls are going to look like. What can we reasonably anticipate? How do we engage the citizens’ group in the process?”

Institutional controls are a set of legal, educational and regulatory measures implemented to control and manage long-term exposure to contaminated material left in place after the end of EPA’s active cleanup in Libby. Those measures can be anything from an informational hotline to recorded deed restrictions on property, and have yet to be designed for the Libby site.

The City-County Board of Health recently engaged in a recruitment process to find area residents willing to serve on a committee to help provide input and assistance with the design of the institutional controls. Raines is currently screening letters of interest received during that recruitment effort.

Stoops said public participation in the design process is vital to the program’s long-term success.

“Whatever we come up with has to be something that works with the local community,” he said. “Protecting the people of Lincoln County has to be our top priority and it has to be done in a way that works for the people of the community.”

Raines said the primary issues under discussion with regard to the institutional controls are cost and effectiveness. EPA regulations require any controls be stringent enough to ensure the long-term protectiveness of the remedy, meaning those controls have to be able to effectively manage exposure to contaminated materials left behind in Libby. With such programs, however, come costs and the question of who bears those costs. As part of EPA’s settlement with W.R. Grace and Company, the owners of the vermiculite mine which was the source of Libby’s asbestos contamination, the agency set aside $11 million for long-term operations and maintenance. Additionally, Sen. Chas Vincent carried and passed Senate Bill 20 during the 2015 legislative session, which diverts up to $600,000 per year from the state’s Zortman-Landusky fund for Libby Superfund site maintenance beginning in 2018. Those funds are available for an initial period of nine years, but could be extended beyond that as needed, Raines said.

Raines said the commissioners decided prior to the meeting they were going to fight to keep any of the long-term costs off the backs of Lincoln County and its residents, holding EPA to one of the promises made by then-director Christine Todd Whitman when she visited Libby in 2001.

“We are ready to work with you because we all share the common goal of getting this problem fixed,” she said. “And because we share that goal I want to assure you of something else. It has never been our plan to look to you to pay for any part of this clean-up, including the clean-up of residential properties. That is why I am pleased to announce that EPA is taking an unusual legal step to protect you from future liability, whether or not we end up listing Libby on the National Priorities List. We will be providing homeowners with legal guarantees – called ‘A No Action Assurance’ – that will protect them from EPA’s ever seeking to have them assume the costs of cleanup. Similarly, local businesses in Libby that did not know about the hazards of vermiculite before November 1999, and that did not profit from its use, will also receive this guarantee.”

No decisions were made during the course of the meetings, but Stoops said both DEQ and the county commissioners were on the same page with regard to the goals of the institutional controls design and the responsibility for the long-term costs.

Raines characterized the meetings as refreshing and productive. The point of the meetings was to tighten up the design process for the institutional controls plan, not to design the controls themselves, and, he said, state and county officials were able to work together to start hammering out that process.

“It was a good couple of meetings,” he said. “It was refreshing because it was really the first time that the county and the state were able to sit down and discuss some of the difficult decisions that still need to be made.”