In May 2015, U.S. Senators Rounds and Inhofe of the Committee on Environment and Public Works submitted a request to U.S. Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) to “review EPA’s efforts to clean up sites with contaminated sediments, with a particular focus on sites ‘mega’ sites where expected cleanup costs will exceed $50 million.” Specifically, they raised concerns that EPA regions were no longer complying with “policies, guidance, and procedures” intended to improve the “timeliness, cost-effectiveness, consistency, and quality of sediment site cleanups.” Senators Rounds and Inhofe further requested that GAO address the following issues:

• Whether EPA is following its policies, procedures, and guidance for sediment site cleanups;
• Role and use of the National Superfund Remedy Review Board (NRRB) and the Contaminated Sediments Technical Advisory Group (CSTAG)
• Coordination between EPA Headquarters and Regional offices in remedy selection, and specifically, before a remedy is proposed;
• Number of contaminated sediment sites that meet the “mega” definition and their locations; and
• Steps that EPA Headquarters can take to improve the “timeliness, cost-effectiveness, consistency, and quality of these cleanups.”

This fall, after conducting a performance audit, in conformance with the governmental auditing procedures, GAO issued its report in September. The report examined the following: 1) “steps EPA has taken to help provide national consistency in its management of Superfund sediment sites; (2) the extent to which EPA followed these steps at selected Superfund sediment sites; and (3) the challenges EPA officials said the agency faced in managing cleanups of Superfund sediment sites. Before rendering its recommendation, GAO reviewed the applicable laws, regulations, and guidance. It also reviewed a sample of 6 of the 71 Tier 1 and 12 of the 17 Tier 2 Superfund sediment sites, as well as documents from the selected sites. In addition, GAO interviewed EPA officials and representatives of two stakeholder groups.

As part of its analysis, GAO examined the role of CSTAG. CSTAG’s role is to “monitor the progress of and provide advice on sites throughout the cleanup process,” “review the consideration memorandums for Tier 2 sites and meets with regional staff as part of the consultation process,” and “provide recommendations to regions on their proposed cleanup approach, and regional staff are to provide written responses to CSTAG for recommendations” for Tier 2 sites, which are the large, complex, or controversial sediment sites.

Overall, GAO found that EPA considers its risk management principles that it issued in order to make “nationally consistent and scientifically sound decisions” at the Superfund sites. While EPA has developed operating procedures for its more complex Tier 2 sites, it could seek to clarify them further. To that end, the report concluded that those procedures failed to clearly “describe what type of information and documentation, if any” to submit to CSTAG members before update meetings. Thus, GAO’s recommendation was that “EPA [should] clarify CSTAG’s operating procedures for the type of information and documentation, if any, that should be prepared for CSTAG in advance of update meetings.”

Given that EPA agreed with GAO’s recommendations, it will be interesting to see whether EPA will commit to this formalized process for providing information and documentation to CSTAG on a consistent basis. Because sediment sites tend to be more complex and associated with high cleanup costs, it will be interesting to see what type of impact formalizing the process will have on the remedy selection process for these Superfund sites.

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