Utah firms take great efforts to avoid Superfund stigma

At the old Salt Lake Gun Club on Redwood Road, workers are sifting through tons of mud and muck trying to remove countless lead BBs left over from millions of shotgun blasts.

It's a tedious task, said Bill Rees, an environmental scientist who is overseeing the cleanup for the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). "It's like trying to find a needle in the haystack."

But the property owner, Crete Carrier Corp. of Lincoln, Neb., has voluntarily agreed to clean up the pellets that have contaminated the dirt with lead. The company likes that approach, saying the state's voluntary cleanup program is a far cry from a federal Superfund listing.

"A Superfund site carries a lot of baggage with it," Rees said.

The old gun club is one of 14 badly polluted properties across the state now being cleaned up voluntarily. Since 1997 when the Utah Legislature enacted the program, seven contaminated sites have been completely cleaned up.

Quite simply, industry officials like the state approach as much as they loathe Superfund, the federal program that has been the hallmark of industrial cleanups since the 1970s.

For one thing, once the property is cleaned up under the state program, state environmental regulators issue a "certificate of completion" that certifies that the property is clean. The certificate releases the developer from any responsibility or liability for the contamination, and it turns once-unusable lands into prime development properties.

"It provides a little bit of comfort that the state may not come back to the applicant for further enforcement action," Rees said.

Voluntary cleanup also is quicker and less costly than Superfund, primarily because it is pursued voluntarily without costly litigation and compliance requirements that typically dog Superfund projects.

Not that Superfund hasn't played an important role in cleaning up some of Utah's worst toxic messes. To date, more than $500 million in private and federal dollars has been spent cleaning up 12 contaminated Superfund sites in Salt Lake County alone, from the infamous lead and arsenic contamination around the Sharon Steel plant in Midvale to the toxic chemicals at the American Barrel site in downtown Salt Lake City near the Triad Center.