Urban Land Use and Superfund Cleanups

:The federal Superfund program to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances has been long criticized for the high costs that it imposes on urban governments and other parties responsible for site cleanups. To address this and other perceived shortcomings of the program, legislators in Congress have proposed changes to the Superfund statute that would tie cleanup at a Superfund site to the site’s expected future land use. Such changes could lead to more efficient cleanups, promote economic development, and improve local public involvement in cleanup activities. Based on a case study of a Superfund site in the Boston metropolitan area and other work, we argue in this article that such laudable goals are complicated by the difficulty of combining cleanup and redevelopment objectives, the problem of ensuring representative public involvement, and the ambiguous legal and regulatory responsibilities of institutions charged with long-term management of hazardous substances left on site.