[CPEO-BIF] Michigan's brownfield laws

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

Changes in Brownfield Laws Will Help Michigan

By Russ Harding
Mackinac Center for Public Policy (MI)
June 3, 2010

Michigan's brownfield contaminated site cleanup program, once considered 
by many to be the best in the nation, is today largely dysfunctional. 
The main problem is that it is nearly impossible to get closure - once 
you check in you can never check out. Businesses are reluctant to invest 
money to clean up contaminated sites when they are at the whim of state 
environmental regulators for a never ending series of additional cleanup 
requirements.

Michigan made significant changes in how it deals with brownfield 
cleanups by amending state environmental cleanup laws in the mid 1990s. 
Michigan abandoned the federal model which makes a business responsible 
for cleanup costs just by being in the chain of title even if they were 
not responsible for the contamination. Instead Michigan lawmakers with 
bipartisan support adopted a causation standard that says if you caused 
the pollution you pay to clean it up and if you did not cause the 
pollution you are not responsible for costs. Another significant change 
in the law was to tailor cleanup standards to environmental and human 
health risks rather than the previous requirement that all sites be 
cleaned up to background levels. These two changes in the law opened up 
a floodgate of investment in brownfields around the state.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.mackinac.org/12899

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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