Agency says PCB monitoring and mitigation will continue

For many people, much of the news coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the second Trump administration has been disheartening.

Lee Zeldin, the former New York State legislator who was recently appointed to lead the agency, has said he intends to roll back dozens of regulations, slash the agency budget by 65 percent and eliminate its scientific research department.

"We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion," he said in a news release on March 12. Zeldin described regulations targeting greenhouse-gas emissions, the primary driver of climate change, as "hidden 'taxes' on U.S. families."

But announcements from the EPA's Albany office, which oversees the Hudson River PCBs Superfund Site, have a different tone.

"We are full speed ahead with our full team," said Project Director Gary Klawinksi, an EPA veteran, earlier this week.

He said that includes the continuing monitoring and clean-up of pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that General Electric dumped into the river from two manufacturing plants over a 40-year period that ended in 1977. The pollution ended commercial fishing in the river and kicked off decades of legal battles.

The EPA will continue to work with the Army Corps of Engineers to clean the river, Klawinski said. He noted that, as part of a settlement agreement with the agency, GE has to reimburse his office for the work.

"It's all set up under different, various legal agreements, and those legal agreements are important," he said. Klawinski said Superfund programs appear to be off the table from funding cuts and freezes that are taking place elsewhere. The agency also receives some of its funding from outside the federal government. "It's my understanding that the Superfund program remains an important part of both the EPA and this administration's work, regardless of who is reimbursing the projects," he said.

At EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., a representative said "work continues apace at Superfund sites" because "the president's priorities and Administrator Zeldin's first pillar of Powering the Great American Comeback is providing every American with clean air, land and water."

In the last days of the Biden administration, Klawinski's office released a final version of its latest five-year review of the cleanup. It confirmed the findings of a draft released in July 2024 that determined the EPA doesn't have enough information to determine if GE needs to continue to dredge sediment from the Upper Hudson to remove PCBs. Klawinski said that the agency plans to release an addendum by 2027 - and possibly as soon as this year - which will make that determination.

Local environmental groups, banding together under the name Friends of a Clean Hudson, released their own report in November 2023, analyzing the data that the EPA used and concluding that it has enough to rule the cleanup hasn't worked. For more than a decade, the groups have warned that the clean-up was doomed to fail because initial measurements of the contamination were flawed and GE wasn't targeting PCB "hot spots."

Last week, 15 members of Congress from New York and New Jersey, including Rep. Pat Ryan, a Democrat whose district includes Beacon, and Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican whose district includes Philipstown, signed a letter to Zeldin urging him to declare that the cleanup has not worked, based on 2023 and 2024 data.

But in Albany, Klawinski said "we just don't scientifically have enough years of data in order to be able to, with enough confidence, make a decision" about the effectiveness of the cleanup. While the data shows that the level of PCBs in fish and sediment are declining, "are they going down in a way that meets the expectations of the record of decision in those legal agreements?" he asked.

Klawinski said his office is analyzing the most recent data, which wasn't included in the five-year report. It...