Toxic cleanups in Tacoma and elsewhere on hold because of bickering politicians

Because the state’s capital-budget bill went up in smoke, Tacoma, Ruston and Vashon Island will lose out on most of this year’s planned work to scrub away pollution from the long-gone Asarco copper smelter.

The Ruston smelter — as many newcomers to the South Sound have to learn on their own — tainted the soil across 1,000 square miles with lead and arsenic from a 571-foot smokestack for decades. The pollution accumulated so widely that the problem remains a public-health concern more than 30 years later.

To this day, public-health agencies instruct residents in state-mapped high-risk areas from West Seattle to near Olympia to keep their children away from yard dirt, avoid wearing shoes inside the home and wash hands frequently.

For years, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has offered free yard testing for much of the affected area. The worst-polluted yards, those with soil above 230 parts per million of arsenic or 500 ppm of lead, qualified for free soil replacement, paid for with money from Asarco’s bankruptcy settlement.

That won’t happen this year because of a bureaucratic hitch triggered by the state Legislature’s failed negotiations.

Planned pollution cleanups of 42 Tacoma and Vashon Island yards, and Sandy Shores Community Park, scheduled for this year have been put off until 2018, the state Department of Ecology announced Monday.

Even though Asarco long ago surrendered the money to pay for those cleanups and hundreds of others, the state capital budget wasn’t passed to authorize spending it.

House and Senate proposals each said to spend more than $20 million over the next two years on cleanups and related projects for pollution left by the Ruston smelter and a smaller one in Everett.

The money for it has been in hand since the bankruptcy settlement became final in 2009. It will remain there until the Legislature acts again.

Michael Matter, a retired homeowner who worked at the Asarco smelter, said he was resigned to waiting yet another year to clean up his yard on North 51st Street, as a follow-up for work done in 2005.

“It is what it is,” he said. “We just wipe our feet all the time.”

Further delays in the long waiting list for yard-soil replacement are not the only consequence of the Legislature’s inaction.

The Health Department has reduced its soil-sampling work, so requests for its yard testing will face longer waits. New homeowners on Vashon and Maury Island won’t get free testing at all, state officials said.

Also, Dirt Alert television commercials that are the only way many new residents are informed about the toxins left by the South Sound’s industrial legacy will go off the air.

Outreach programs in schools and child-care centers to teach the importance of handwashing in the smelter plume will be stopped.

If the Legislature continues its inaction, the state’s entire smelter plume project is scheduled to conclude in fall 2018, Ecology Department officials said.

This story was originally published August 2, 2017 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Toxic cleanups in Tacoma and elsewhere on hold because of bickering politicians."