Superfund

For most of the seven years since Congress provided the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with tools to expedite Superfund settlement, the agency has done little to promote their use and has placed little emphasis on the need to reduce transaction costs. These tools included (1) "de minimus" settlements, (2) nonbinding allocations of responsibility for cleanup costs by EPA to responsible parties, (3) mixed-funding agreements between EPA and parties to share cleanup costs, and (4) alternative dispute resolution and the use of neutral third-parties to help resolve liability and cost allocation problems. As a result, the full potential of the tools to reduce transaction costs is unknown. Before EPA can make more effective use of these settlement tools, management issues must be addressed. EPA needs to work toward creating an enforcement attitude that is concerned with the transaction costs of Superfund's responsible parties. This would include assessing the potential applicability of these settlement tools, creating regional accountability for their use, targeting resources, reviewing administrative procedures, and making potentially responsible parties more aware of the existence of these tools.