Democrats Say Public Needs Details on Toxic Waste Sites

At a congressional hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the Environmental Protection Agency had designated as confidential the details of about 140 Superfund sites where toxic exposure remained uncontrolled.

Boxer and other Democrats said the secret data included information about how much money and time it would take to clean up the dangerous sites, including one site where the EPA predicted it would take 26 years to close off access to toxics.

"This isn't a question of left or right," Boxer said, waving a document marked "Privileged" by EPA officials to prevent its release to the public. "This is a question of right and wrong."

The EPA said that it had blocked only information related to law enforcement and that the public had access to all relevant health-risk data for the sites, seven of which are in California.

"There is far more information available for each [high-priority] site than has ever been available before," said Susan Parker Bodine, the assistant administrator responsible for the Superfund program, which was designed to clean up toxic waste sites such as chemical dumping grounds and contaminated factories.

Republicans said Democrats were trying to manufacture a political issue, and noted that Senate tradition had long prevented the release of sensitive information.

They also said they feared that Democrats were seeking to reinstate a controversial tax in which chemical manufacturers and other companies were forced to pay a fee to contribute to cleaning up waste sites, even if the firms played no role in creating the mess.

"This tax would fall on businesses already paying for their own cleanup or that had never created any kind of a Superfund site," said Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate environment committee. "It would put a burden on those companies."

Democrats have routinely accused the Bush administration of restricting access to information designed to protect the public. One Republican-sponsored bill moving through Congress would limit data available on toxic substances released into communities, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has blocked information on flooding dangers in Florida.