“After the EPA’s assessment and inspection of Allied’s Valmont Butte site in 1982, the agency controlled by Burford, Lavelle and their like-minded Reagan appointees scored the contaminated site at 27.8 points on the HRS and labeled it for “no further action.” There would be no Superfund dollars to help the state clean up the butte and thereby disrupt what it believed were dangerous pathways for contamination to reach the public through surface and groundwater as well as in the air. There would be no federal dollars because the butte had come up short by seventenths of a single point from making it onto the EPA’s Superfund NPL. The state objected, of course, but their arguments fell on deaf ears at an agency whose top priority had become to spend no taxpayer money, levy no fines on polluting businesses and find no contamination unless it served a greater political purpose for the Republican Party. It was truly a scandalous time at EPA, but it was a scandal that would be exposed.”
Read the entire article at the Boulder Weekly: How Reagan and the largest EPA scandal in history may explain why Valmont Butte is still contaminated.
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