[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 77 (Thursday, May 30, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E965]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    SUPPORT FOR HIA DATABASE CENTER

                                 ______


                          HON. GEORGE W. GEKAS

                            of pennsylvania

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 30, 1996

  Mr. GEKAS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today during our debate on H.R. 3517, 
the Military Construction Appropriations Act for fiscal year 1997, to 
express my strong support for the establishment of a site database 
center at the Harrisburg International Airport (HIA), in Middletown, 
PA. Located on the immediate and surrounding grounds of HIA (the former 
Olmsted Air Force Base) is a Superfund Site, designated in 1984, the 
existence of which is due directly to the activities that took place 
during the operation of Olmsted Air Force Base from 1917 to 1967. For 
the last 13 years, an intense effort has been undertaken at the local, 
State and Federal level to determine the nature of the hazardous waste 
left by the Air Force when it closed Olmsted, the origins and locations 
of its spread, and remediation of the waste, all within the dictates of 
the Superfund designation and with the goal of getting HIA deleted off 
the Superfund list by the end of this year.
  My involvement with the HIA Superfund Site has been since 1983 when 
it was thought, erroneously we now know, that an inclusion on the 
Superfund list would be the fastest, cheapest and best way to clean up 
the waste left by the Air Force. How wrong we were in that thinking is 
another, longer story. But, in the years since HIA was put on the 
Superfund list, the Air Force, the Army Corps of Engineers, the 
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (the current owner of the land), local, 
regional and private entities, our late U.S. Senator John Heinz, former 
Senator Wofford, current Senators Specter and Santorum, and this Member 
of Congress (along with many others too numerous to mention at this 
time) have sought to make the cleanup at HIA a model site cleanup 
program for other Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) across the United 
States to emulate.
  As part of the cleanup effort, funds were dedicated in several 
Defense Appropriations bills to provide for a full cleanup of the site. 
All parties have understood that full cleanup meant that following 
Superfund delisting the land in question should be available for public 
and private development. Throughout the cleanup process, volumes of 
data have been collected from the several environmental investigations 
conducted for the final remedy and delisting of the site. A crucial 
part of the current delisting effort and any post-delisting development 
that occurs is the interpretation and management of this data. 
Remediation cannot occur under Superfund without the requisite 
interpretations of site data. Post-Superfund developers must know what 
happened on the site, and any future environmental questions that arise 
at HIA must refer back to the data from the current cleanup effort. 
When all the current participants have left the site, the only reliable 
reference source will be a database.
  Unfortunately, as we near the end of the long march to delisting, a 
serious bar to full cleanup has arisen: the maintenance of a useful 
site database. The Air Force, through the Army Corps of Engineers, 
refuses to either maintain, or pay for the maintenance of, a site 
database. The Air Force is wrong in their refusal. From the very 
beginning, in my many meetings with various Secretaries and Under 
Secretaries of Defense regarding HIA, it was fully understood that 
post-Superfund site maintenance would include a managed database, and 
appropriations were made with the database in mind.
  In fact, the Department of Defense, as recently as this year, has 
stated its support for the type of post-remediation followup the 
database would provide. In a February 22, 1996 letter from Sherri W. 
Goodman, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Environmental Security), 
she cites her support for the annual report to Congress of the Defense 
Environmental Response Task Force (DERTF), which she chairs: ``The 
purpose of the DERTF is to study and provide findings and 
recommendations for expediting and improving environmental response 
actions at military installations being closed or realigned.'' Further, 
Section 3.3 of the DERTF Report states: ``Effective measures must be in 
place before transfer of property to ensure adequate protection of 
human health and the environment.'' And, in the same report, Section 
3.4--Liability For Subsequent Response Actions: ``However, further 
cleanup may be required if the land use changes and the original 
remedy, although protective for the anticipated land use, is not fully 
protective under the new land use.''
  Mr. Speaker, how can the Department of Defense in one publication 
express a need for and responsibility of site maintenance in the future 
and then deny such maintenance as is proposed with the site database 
for Harrisburg International Airport with the site database? And, to 
further weaken the DoD position on the HIA database, I offer that the 
Pennsylvania State University (PSU) at Harrisburg, which also serves as 
the Pennsylvania State Data Center, has proposed to manage and maintain 
the HIA site database for five years for under $123,000. Mr. Speaker, 
this is a public entity, a professional data center, and an on-site 
location which has offered to manage a database for five years for a 
price the Department of Defense would probably charge for one year (and 
not do nearly as well).
  Mr. Speaker, the facts are these: the Department of Defense made a 
commitment to this Member of Congress and the Commonwealth of 
Pennsylvania to manage and maintain this database; the Department of 
Defense has stated this year in a Report to Congress its commitment to 
post-cleanup development and database management at its waste sites; 
the Pennsylvania State University has offered the best database 
management service at the best location for the best price. Mr. 
Speaker, I believe that the Committee on Appropriations could have 
easily been persuaded to require the Department of Defense to fund this 
site database. We hope that the Department of Defense, and the Air 
Force and Corps of Engineers in particular, will see that the PSU 
database offer is the proper--and best--way to proceed and will make 
available the $123,000 for the PSU-managed database from the 
appropriations it has already been given by the Congress to fully clean 
up the HIA/Olmsted site.

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