Cleanup funding is shelved for budget's sake

A legislative battle over a state Senate plan to shore up a hazardous-sites cleanup program by taking more than $40 million from a land-preservation fund was threatening the passage of Pennsylvania's budget yesterday.

So lawmakers resorted to an old strategy: put off the problem.

By mid-afternoon, Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.) was recommending to House and Senate leaders that they wait two months to vote on the issue of future funding for the Hazardous Sites Cleanup Fund, known as HASCA. As chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Evans controls the movement of the budget bills through the House. He suggested yesterday that a permanent source of money for HASCA should be worked out during a special session of the General Assembly scheduled to begin Sept. 17.

Also at that time, lawmakers will take up another issue they could not resolve as part of the budget deal: Gov. Rendell's energy-independence proposals, including an expansion of alternative energy use.

Among preservationists and lawmakers, reaction to the HASCA delay ranged from outrage to relief.

For 20 years HASCA has paid for the cleanup and investigation of contaminated sites. Not acting immediately to support it is "immoral," said State Rep. Kate Harper (R., Montgomery). Last night she urged the House to defeat an Evans amendment that would implement the state's entire $27.2 billion spending plan without addressing HASCA funding. "Without taking care of [that] funding . . .," she said, "we are leaving the people we represent without clean air and clean water - and that's wrong."

However, opposition had grown in ferocity against Senate Bill 913, passed June 26, that would annually divert nearly half of the Keystone Recreation, Park and Conservation Fund's $86 million budget to HASCA.

For the last 14 years, communities and land trusts throughout Pennsylvania have counted on grants from Keystone, or Key '93, to create parks and greenways, protect open space and even renovate libraries.

Molly Morrison, president of the Media-based Natural Lands Trust, said she was "grateful" the legislature would take more time to find a solution to HASCA's fiscal problems.

"There is no need to sacrifice one for the other," she said of the two programs.

At the Montgomery County-Norristown Public Library yesterday, executive director Kathleen Arnold-Yerger was rooting for a remedy that would not touch Key '93.

"Public libraries so desperately need the monies that are there," she said.

Senate Bill 913 threatens at least $36 million in Keystone grants for Philadelphia and Bucks, Chester Delaware and Montgomery Counties. Key '93 is supported by 15 percent of the realty transfer tax, a state revenue source that has grown substantially in recent years because of booming home sales. By 2009, the fund is projected to receive more than $95 million annually in realty transfer tax, according to Patrick Henderson, executive director of the Senate's environmental resources and energy committee.

Senate leaders rejected an alternative proposed by the Rendell administration late Friday. It called for $20 million to be transferred from Key '93 to HASCA annually for the next two years. But that money would be replaced from Growing Greener II, a $625 million bond fund for environmental and open-space protection projects such as farmland preservation, acid-mine drainage cleanup and state park maintenance.

"We are not inclined to agree to a temporary patch," said Erik Arneson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R., Delaware).

Morrison, of Natural Lands Trust, suggested that both sides are closer than they may think.

"We all want the same thing," she said. "A green and clean Pennsylvania to call home."