Talks To Fund Hanford Cleanup Collapse House-Senate Committee $57 Million Apart At Adjournment

Efforts to reach a compromise on funding to clean up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and other Department of Energy sites collapsed Tuesday as a House-Senate conference committee adjourned for the night with conferees still $57 million apart.

House members of the conference committee, which is trying to write a final version of a $19 billion energy and water appropriations bill, have refused to budge on adding the $57 million in additional funding requested by Washington state’s two senators, Republican Slade Gorton and Democrat Patty Murray.

The two had originally sought to increase funding by $127 million, but Senate conferees balked.

The conference committee will meet this morning and Rep. Richard “Doc” Hastings, R-Wash., was lobbying the Republican House members of the committee to change their minds.

The effort had picked up support from House Speaker Newt Gingrich, House Appropriations Chairman Bob Livingston, R-La., and other members of the House Republican leadership.

Murray said she had been told she and Gorton needed only one vote on the House side to prevail.

The focus of the last-minute lobbying was Indiana Republican Rep. John Myers, chairman of the House energy and water development appropriations subcommittee. Myers’ credentials as a budget cutter had previously been questioned by some Republicans. Since then, he has become a fierce critic of DOE and decided to play hardball over the cleanup budget.

“We made a commitment not to go above $5.5 billion and we aren’t going to,” Myers said.

The House-passed version of the bill includes $5.2 billion for cleanup at DOE’s defense production sites, while the Senate had approved almost $6 billion in funding.

After weeks of refusing to compromise, Myers late Monday agreed to a $5.5 billion funding level. At that level, Hanford would receive about $1.3 billion.

But Murray and Gorton believed the compromise should have split the difference between the House and Senate versions and decided to press their amendment.

Myers said that even at $5.5 billion, the cleanup program was getting a 12 percent increase over the previous year. Gorton said funding for actual cleanup was going down as responsibility for DOE’s Savannah River complex was being transferred to the environmental and waste cleanup program.

Myers also insisted that even though DOE was no longer producing nuclear weapons, employment at Hanford and other production sites had gone up.

“It’s not our responsibility to find jobs for all these people,” Myers said.

Gorton bristled at such suggestions and said almost 16,000 employees at Hanford, Rocky Flats, the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and Savannah River, have been laid off.