In thousands of instances across Michigan, polluted ground isn't being cleaned up, and there's not much the state's enforcement officers can do about it.
A lack of funding and legal authority are making it hard for the short-staffed Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, to hold polluters accountable.
"There's a long list of sites that need immediate attention," said Tom Simpson, a DEQ project manager who oversees all gas tank leaks in Ingham and Clinton counties.
Michigan's varied geology and history have left the state with a legacy of environmental problems, officials say.
"We have been a manufacturing center for more than 100 years," said Phil Schrantz, chief of field operations in the DEQ's Remediation and Redevelopment Division. "These practices have not come without a cost to the environment."
The state's leaking underground storage tank program, which monitors the cleanups of petroleum leaks from buried tanks, illustrates the extent of the challenge the DEQ faces.
On Tuesday, Simpson oversaw the removal of two 15,000 gallon tanks at the site of a now-closed gas station on the northeast corner of Saginaw Street and Abbott Road. The tanks appeared to be in good shape, Simpson said, likely better than many that remain in the ground around East Lansing. Petroleum products tend to spread easily underground. If leaks are left untreated, they can contaminate the water supply over an area of miles.
There are only 24 sites in East Lansing where underground storage tanks are installed, and among them there are 27 leaks, according to a DEQ database. Most of those leaks come from local gas stations, and four are at research and maintenance facilities on the southern part of MSU's campus.
Combined, Ingham and Clinton counties have 330 untreated leaks.
The problem is only magnified at the state level — where of the 22,000 tanks installed around Michigan, there are about 9,000 leaks at more than 7,000 sites — creating a backlog that overwhelms DEQ staff.
"You sort of have to pick and choose your priority sites," said Dennis Eagle, chief of the DEQ's leaking storage tank enforcement unit.
About 4,200 of the polluted sites are considered "orphans," meaning no liable party can be found and the responsibility for cleanup is left to the state.
It would cost the state about $1.7 billion to clean up all those sites, said Sharon Goble, a DEQ environmental quality specialist. At current funding levels, the cleanups would take more than 70 years, she said.
Many states have a policy of strict liability — meaning whoever owns the contaminated property must clean it up, whether they caused the pollution or not. In 1995, Michigan's law was changed to hold only the parties who did the polluting responsible, leading to orphan sites when liability can't be determined.
Polluters are required by law to perform cleanups, but the DEQ doesn't have enough enforcement staff to ensure that happens in all cases.
In 1995, the state pulled the plug on a program that reimbursed property owners who cleaned up their pollution.
"At that time, the rate of compliance dropped off dramatically," said Andrew Hogarth, chief of the Remediation and Redevelopment Division.
Cleanup timelines and non-compliance penalties often aren't strict enough to motivate owners to take action in a timely manner, officials said.
The DEQ continues to receive about $60 million each year for cleanups from a tax on gasoline, but that's not even enough to meet the department's highest priority needs, officials said.
Only about $40 million is left from a 1998 ballot initiative that bonded $675 million for cleanups.
"We all kind of put in that extra effort to make sure the job gets done," DEQ spokesman Bob McCann said. "It's getting progressively harder."
McCann and state Sen. Mike Goschka, R-Brant, agreed that budgets are lean not just in the remediation programs, but across the DEQ and across Michigan.
"We've had to cut (Michigan's) budget over the last three years or so about $3 billion. That takes a toll," said Goschka, who is vice chairperson of Senate appropriations sub-committee responsible for DEQ funding.
"At the end of the day we'll take a good look at the remediation effort, because that's something that's important," Goschka said. "It's costly, but it's something that we do need to put money toward."
