Waiting on Remediation: The Superfund Program’s Impact on Local Governance

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 16: Urban and Community Sociology

Abstract

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly referred to as Superfund, was adopted in 1980 and provides the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the authority and funding to clean up some of the nation’s most contaminated sites, including those that have been degraded by activities such as illegal hazardous waste dumping, manufacturing, and mining. A growing body of research has demonstrated that exposure to contamination from Superfund sites poses risks to children’s cognitive development; residents’ health and earning potential; places an undue burden on vulnerable communities; and strains local budgets (Kiaghadi et al. 2021; Persico et al. 2021; Stephans et al. 2022). Given that most evaluations of Superfund overlook local government officials, this investigation focuses on the following research questions: How have local representatives’ and administrators’ ability to govern been affected by having a Superfund site within their city? How have these contaminated sites impacted local governments’ efforts to meet state mandates, address voters’ demands, and address equity concerns? Lastly, what strategies have local officials developed to govern while they are waiting on the federal government to remediate a Superfund site? To address these questions, environmental justice and Adaptive Management will be used as the theoretical frameworks to conduct and analyze qualitative interviews of local representatives and administrators in Virginia, building on interviews collected in a previous study in California. The findings of this study have the potential to contribute to a greater understanding of the challenges of Superfund’s policy framework and the interdisciplinary impacts of that policy at the local government level, as well as a research model to encourage further community-based research on contamination, which is of particular importance in light of climate change and extreme weather events.

Author

• Jacqueline Maciel, Virginia Tech