Bill Proposes Cleanup Czar For Hanford Environmental Cleanup Law Likely To Be Voted Down, Skeptics Say

Call it the Tri-Cities Protection Act. Call it the Hanford Full Employment Law. Call it an attempt to save the nuclear reservation from the ravages of budget-cutting.

Call it what you will, the bill introduced Tuesday, with support from top state officials and a bipartisan mix of Washington’s congressional delegation, is one unusual piece of special-interest legislation.

“It’s a unique bill trying to address a very unique problem, potentially the biggest public-works project in the world,” said one Northwest Senate aide.

It is called the Enhanced Environmental Cleanup and Management Demonstration Act of 1995, and it is something to behold. If passed into law - something skeptics think is unlikely - it would put cleanup of the 560-square-mile Hanford nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington directly in the hands of the president of the United States.

That would put the future of the Tri-Cities area - Richland, Pasco and Kennewick, Wash. - which exist primarily as a result of Hanford, directly in his hands as well.

The president would be responsible for appointing a site manager, who would have to report to Congress every two years on the cleanup effort’s progress.

The site manager, now an upper-level bureaucrat at the Department of Energy, would become something of a nuclear-waste-cleanup czar.

He or she would have broad power to hire people and buy supplies, providing preference was shown to local products and people.

Energy Department rules wouldn’t apply unless the site manager determined they were essential to protect human health or the environment.

Anybody who was of a mind to have Hanford designated as a historic place would be thwarted by the law.

To top it all off, the state - not the federal government - would regulate Superfund cleanup at the site.

At the heart of the legislation - beyond providing some certainty that cleanup funding will continue - is accountability. The legislation proposes a trade-off. It says, in essence, continue spending money at Hanford, put someone really in charge and let’s see what happens.

“DOE is plagued with a gaping absence of firm, decisive leadership,” said U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., a co-sponsor of the bill in the Senate. “Likewise, Hanford and its communities suffer from an overabundance of committees, review processes, open-ended debates and rule by consensus. This process simply has not worked.”

Gorton called the present arrangement of “paper-shuffling bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., trying to manage, direct and understand paper-shuffling bureaucrats in Richland” unacceptable.

“This bill changes the nature of leadership at Hanford and puts complete authority for cleanup decisions, and all other site operations, under the site manager’s purview,” Gorton said. “Accountability and responsibility are focused locally. There will be no room for excuses if the job is not being done promptly and properly.”

The bill is a compromise that has the blessings of Washington’s Democratic Gov. Mike Lowry and state Attorney General Christine Gregoire.

Co-sponsoring the Senate bill, in addition to Gorton, are Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Mark Hatfield, R-Ore. In the House, Republicans Richard “Doc” Hastings and Rick White, as well as Democrat Norm Dicks, have signed onto the legislation.

The proposal comes at a time when Congress and the administration are growing increasingly impatient with the pace of cleanup at the country’s nuclear-waste sites, of which Hanford is by far the largest.

Dramatic decreases in the Energy Department’s environmental-management budget have been proposed. Thousands of jobs are being lost in communities trying to convert from making bombs to cleaning up the mess left behind.

One of the fears is that in their haste to balance the budget, Congress and the administration will whack the cleanup budget with little or no regard to past agreements the federal government has made with local communities to clean up the sites.