South Carolina Needs Funding for Gas Leak Clean Up
According to John Mason, a groundwater section chief with the Environmental Protection Agency in Atlanta Georgia, budget negotiators have convinced lawmakers to add an additional five million dollars to the budget, but this is not enough. In addition to this, lawmakers return to Columbia this week, and they are not expected to approve any more funds for the clean up project.
Mason has stated that the existing sites in desperate need of cleaning up are a huge problem; a problem that is going to take not only a lot of money, but also a lot of time.
The underground gas tanks release chemicals that can be potentially harmful to wells. The fact that lawmakers are not approving the funds necessary to perform the much needed clean up is very disturbing. More than one million residents in the state of South Carolina have a well as their primary water source. What will happen if these one million residents are drinking water contaminated by the underground gas leaks?
Greenville County alone has approximately two hundred thirty polluted sites, which is the most in the site. There are laws in place to facilitate the clean ups of gas leaks such as this, but the funds are not available.
Perhaps there will be a state gas tax increase. Lawmakers considered adding half a cent to the gas tax to add an additional seventeen million dollars to the program, but at the last minute changed their mind, and decided to add a one time allotment of five million dollars. The current gas tax in South Carolina provides approximately seventeen million dollars each year for gas clean up tasks, but federal regulators claim that at least twice this amount is needed to be effective.
With the large lack of funding in the state, the one hundred leak sites considered the most dangerous have still not received necessary funding.
State Senator John Land is a member of the budget conference committee. He told the AP: “It was no lack of commitment at all; it was simply a balancing act.”
However, this “balancing act” may cause the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suspend their approval of South Carolina’s current clean up fund. What does this mean for South Carolina residents? Gas stations would need to pay for their own cleanup, or purchase private insurance to cover it, which could possibly raise the prices on either gas or other merchandise.
State Representative Jeff Duncan believes that the state needs to provide more funding for clean up projects. He says, according to the AP, “We’ve got to fund this at a level that will get the EPA off our backs”
Source: AP, S.C. lags in cleaning underground gas leaks, http://www.aikenstandard.com/news/357365632223985.php.
