By Kyle Bagenstose for the Beaver County Times
Posted Nov 18, 2019 at 4:01 AM
The sunset of a tax is quickly bankrupting the state’s hazardous cleanup program, and there’s no plan in place to fix it.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection last year paid half a million dollars to provide clean drinking water to dozens of Doylestown Township homeowners stricken by contamination. It spent another $300,000 cleaning up cancer-causing chemicals in Bristol Township’s Croydon neighborhood.
The same chemicals are an even costlier problem in Lancaster County, requiring $4.7 million to provide drinking water to hundreds of people there. The DEP will need millions of dollars more to clean up mysterious barrels recently discovered in a shuttered Beaver County business, where some of the drums are marked simply, “Dark Acid.”
But there’s an even bigger problem tying all of these sites together. Within a few years, the state program funding these environmental cleanups, along with scores of others littered across the commonwealth, is projected to be flat broke.
“That’s the point we’re getting to, unfortunately. One of these sites may have to literally blow up before they get real about dealing with the finances,” said David Hess, a former secretary of the DEP under Gov. Tom Ridge.
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