HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
FEATURED ARTICLE
aside for fiscal 2017, the period which ends September 30.
Presidential budgets should be seen as little more than financial piñatas, big targets to be picked apart. Presidents can propose but the Constitutional reality is that all spending bills must originate in the House and the final outcome on Capitol Hill can be very different than any president’s budget proposal. In fact, there’s now an effort on Capitol Hill to gut the EPA entirely. Proposed legislation — HR 861 — would simply “terminate the Environmental Protection Agency” if passed. While cuts of some sort at the EPA seem likely, reductions to the Superfund effort do not. According to The Washington Post, Scott Pruitt, the incoming EPA Administrator, has stated that “Superfund is an area that is absolutely essential.”
how Washington works. Consider the Board of Tea Examiners: it took Congress a number of tries and nearly a century to kill off a federal agency which in the end had eight employees and a $300,000 budget. In contrast, the EPA now employs some 15,000 people and has an annual budget of $8.1 billion, money spent in every state. It’s the last part that’s important: Superfund money has been spread and sprinkled across the country. Regardless of party, senators, representatives, governors, and mayors all want the spending to continue — especially in their jurisdiction.
FUDS program expenditures through fiscal year 2012 totaled $5.8 billion, however the Army expects the program to continue through 2085 — read indefinitely — at a cost of $280 million a year in constant dollars. Looking forward, there’s an additional $19 billion or so FUDS money to be spent. At this writing it’s been widely reported that the Trump Administration plans to reduce the annual funds set aside for the EPA by $2 billion (about 25 percent) and to slash the workforce by 3,000 jobs (about 20 percent). At the same time, the Trump budget plan also calls for a $54 billion increase in military spending. This means that the FUDS program — a program handled by the Army — might actually see a budget increase at the very same time EPA funding is reduced. Each year about an eighth of the entire EPA budget is spent on Superfund cleanups, roughly $1.1 billion in fiscal 2016. Another $1.1 billion has been set aside for fiscal 2017.”
To understand why the Superfund is largely untouchable you have to know
Home Values & Prices by Superfund Risk Avg Estimated Value Avg 2016 Median Sales Price
$329,172
VERY LOW
$278,846
$268,607
MODERATE
$224,210
$266,032
HIGH
$229,533
$305,193
VERY HIGH
$270,009
ATTOM Data Solutions • P7
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