CAPE COD BOG WATER COMPENSATION

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@igc.org>]

CAPE COD BOG WATER COMPENSATION

In November, members of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation
successfully inserted language into an Appropriations bill allowing the
Air Force to compensate cranberry growers for crop losses due to
pollution from the Massachusetts Military Reservation (MMR).

Last year, cranberry bogs in Falmouth and Mashpee, on Cape Cod, were
contaminated with ethylene dibromide (EDB), a toxic jet fuel additive
that has been flowing through groundwater from the former Otis Air Force
Base, which makes up a major portion of MMR. As a result, growers could
not market the berries from those bogs. The Air Force, which has one of
its largest cleanup projects at Otis, expressed its willingness to
compensate the growers, but it said had no legal authority.

So Massachusetts Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry and
Representatives William Delahunt and Barney Frank (all Democrats)
worked into the Commerce, Justice, State and Judiciary Appropriations
Act language authorizing the payment of $800,000. It's unusual, but
legal, to include language in an Appropriation Act relating to funds
contained in another Appropriations bill. (I assume it was done this way
because the Defense bill had already been signed.)

The language (section 634) reads: "During fiscal year 1998, from funds
available to the Department of Defense, up to $800,000 is available to
the Department of Defense to compensate persons who have suffered
documented commercial loss of cranberry crops in 1997 in the Mashpee or
Falmouth bogs, located on the Quashnet and Coonamessett Rivers,
respectively, as a result of the presence of ethylene dibromide (EDB) in
or on cranberries from either of the plumes of EDB-contaminated
groundwater known as 'FS-28' and 'FS-1' adjacent to the Massachusetts
Military Reservation, Cape Cod, Massachusetts ."

This brief piece of law may set a political precedent for future
compensation, at least at MMR. More important, it conceptually
recognizes a strictly economic cost of pollution. The payment is not for
cleanup. It is not compensation for human health effects or natural
resource damage. Rather, the Air Force is paying cranberry growers
simply because its past activity is costing those growers money.

At a time when responsible parties and regulators alike are increasingly
taking the view that contamination is not a problem unless one can show
health or ecological risk, the Cape Cod legislation appears to be a
creative effort to internalize real costs that don't fit into those
categories.

Lenny Siegel
Director, SFSU CAREER/PRO (and Pacific Studies Center)
c/o PSC, 222B View St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/968-1126
lsiegel@igc.org