Participation scant at public meetings
Representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality held a public input session in Libby earlier this week to gather community feedback regarding the proposed “last call” for the Libby Asbestos Superfund Site, institutional controls and other concerns with the agency’s ongoing clean-up in Libby. During the two-hour open house-style event at the Libby School District Central Administration Building, just one area resident engaged with the agency representatives.
“We were disappointed about the lack of participation in this week’s input session,” said Jennifer Lane, EPA’s community involvement coordinator for Libby. “We’d like to hear from community members who have ideas regarding the site and ideas on how we can increase community participation.”
The conversation centered around the agency’s last call for inspections of potentially contaminated propertiers, which is scheduled to wrap up during 2016, even though agency officials acknowledge the exact details of the last call have not yet been determined. What is at issue are the financial responsibilities for future asbestos contamination.
The last call is targeted at the roughly 700 properties where the owners have yet to allow the agency to inspect for possible asbestos contamination. The goal, Lane said, is to encourage those property owners to participate in the process. Lane said the agency has made multiple attempts to contact the registered owners of those 700 properties by phone, mail and personal visits and ultimately want to inspect all of the properties before ending the inspection program in 2016.
Based upon the statistics, less than one in three inspected properties requires clean-up. The agency has inspected roughly 7,100 properties during the course of the project, with 2,275 requiring clean-up. The agency estimates completing the inspections and remaining clean-ups within the next two to three years, but that clean-up will not end the project, nor will it remove all of the contamination from Libby and Troy.
Despite more than 15 years of active clean-up work in the Libby-Troy area, agency officials have conceded that full removal of the deadly Libby Amphibole Asbestos is neither practicable nor possible. The remedial clean-up plan calls for contaminant left behind walls, under sufficient depths of soil or concrete or in other ways sealed in inaccessible areas to be left behind and managed to limit the long-term risk of exposure. What has yet to be determined is what happens in the future. Houses and other structures are not permanent fixtures. They collapse, they burn down and they are sold and remodeled by new property owners. Material once sealed behind a wall will not remain so indefinitely. So, who is to bear the increased cost of removal when it becomes necessary in the unspecified future? Will contamination, and financial responsibility, be handled differently on properties where the owners have participated in the process?
Those questions, the agency said, will be answered with the as-yet-unidentified institutional controls. These controls can range from something as simple as public notices about potential contamination to active outreach and education programs to deed restrictions and new building and remodeling codes and regulations. The agency’s final remedy plan, the Record of Decision, did not specify the controls to be left in place, but did indicate community input and involvement would be included as part of the design process.
In the most recent Annual Project Update, dated February 2016, the agency reiterated that commitment.
“EPA will accept public comment on the final institutional controls work plan,” the document read. “We will issue a supplemental document to the final remedy (known as the Record of Decision) to clarify the institutional control plan. EPA understands that there is interest in an institutional control plan that can be modified to meet the community’s changing needs.”
Under normal Superfund protocols, once the active phase of remedial action is complete and the agency pulls out, the financial responsibility of long-term maintenance falls to the state. In Libby’s case, a fund with roughly $11 million exists for the purpose of managing the project long-term. Additionally, during the 2015 legislative session, Libby’s Sen. Chas Vincent successfully sponsored a bill that will begin diverting approximately $600,000 per year from the state’s Zortman-Landusky Trust to help pay for ongoing maintenance. The diversion is scheduled to begin in 2018. Exactly how those funds will be allocated will also be determined during the design of the institutional controls and long-term maintenance plan.