Reducing Excessive Deadline Obligations Act of 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Chairman, the polluter pays. The polluter pays, and that is a simple idea with very broad appeal. The company responsible for causing the pollution should have to pay for the cleanup. It makes sense. This bill would relieve many companies of that responsibility when it comes to the most polluted sites in the country. Instead, taxpayers will pick up the tab. It is another bailout.

Currently, if a company is part of an industry with a record of pollution, it needs to post a bond or buy insurance. This requirement helps to prevent a company from polluting until it goes out of business, leaving the taxpayer with the bill for the cleanup.

H.R. 2279 allows the company to skirt its financial responsibility, in essence, to internalize all the money they make while polluting but to externalize all of the costs after they are done and leaving everyone else to shoulder the burden. That is not free market enterprise; that is crony capitalism.

The bill would also reduce funding for highly contaminated sites. It should be increasing funding for the sites so their cleanup does not drag on for decades. Less funding is not the answer. Because funding is already so short for these Superfund sites, we have to prioritize the worst sites for cleanup, and the result is the National Priorities List. This bill would disrupt that priority system.

Mr. Chairman, instead of letting polluters off the hook, we should use the money to put people to work by cleaning up the long list of toxic sites all over the country that are exposing people to toxic waste, pushing down property values, and inhibiting economic growth.

As I close, I just want to say that this bill, like so many bills offered by the majority, rests upon a falsehood, and that is that health and safety regulations hurt the economy. They don't. It is not true. It is a false statement, and there is no evidence for them to prove that it is true. And yet they want us to believe, as these companies deregulate and get tax cuts and all these other benefits, that they are going to use the extra money they get in order to create jobs, which they never do.

Reject this bill. It is a bad idea.

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