Tough trade-off

Funding source for weather center may mean lost jobs, polluted environment

By Sean Murphy, Transcript Staff Writer

A planned $67 million National Weather Center designed to anchor the University of Oklahoma's new research campus will consolidate several university and government weather-related research units and free up much needed office space on campus. But some say the funding source tapped for the state's $22 million portion may bring with it additional economic and environmental costs.

Facing a $350 million budget shortfall this year, the Oklahoma Legislature decided to fund the state's share of the weather center and a research project at Oklahoma State University by diverting $38 million over a four-year period from a Petroleum Storage Tank (PST) Indemnity fund. The money in the fund, which comes from a one-cent tax on motor fuel and is used to clean up fuel leaks from underground storage tanks, will be reduced by 50 percent over the next two years and by 25 percent in 2005 and part of 2006.

The Oklahoma Corporation Commission will now face the prospect of cutting the program in half, prioritizing the worst sites, and creating a contingency plan for emergency cases. The man charged in part with this task will be Tom Tucker, the director of OCC's underground storage tank division. Tucker admitted the funding shortage will force the OCC to take a "Band-Aid" approach to environmental cleanup.

"Instead of cleaning up drinking water, you may just put filters on people's water wells to clean it so they can drink it, but you haven't cleaned the aquifer and you haven't removed the source of the problem," Tucker said.

The problem is a byproduct of a society that has had a love affair with the automobile, and its fuel-burning engine, for nearly a century. There are more than 9,000 permanently closed gas stations/convenience store sites in Oklahoma with 23,603 closed storage tanks on their property. Many of those tanks are old and have leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel into the ground at sites throughout urban and rural Oklahoma. The gasoline leaks down into water tables and then slowly dissolves into and spreads with the groundwater.

Ed Kessler, the former director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory and current vice chair of the public watchdog group Common Cause, said it is a "moral outrage" that a group of environmental scientists at the weather center would be funded from a foundation of enhanced pollution.

"The present situation is a major disgrace," Kessler said. "Do (policy makers) think that the scientists, technicians and administrators who will populate the new building would find this acceptable?"

OU President David Boren and state Sen. Cal Hobson, author of the proposal to divert the PST funds, said it was the only feasible alternative for funding the weather center in a cash-strapped budget year.

"With a budget shortfall of $350 million, I hope everybody understands there was never a serious chance for a bond issue," Hobson said. "I just don't know how you'd do that when you're cutting budgets the way we were. So we were either going to find a way to fund the weather center outside the normal procedures or we were going to lose the weather center. It's that simple."

Boren and Hobson argued that the legislation that diverted the PST funds also recreated the fund for several more years, a move that will make up for the diverted funds in the long run. But Tucker and others say that argument is flawed because the cleanup fund would have continued existing anyway.

"The fund should not be limited in time ... because the problem isn't going to go away," Tucker said. "Everybody wants to drive their own car ... and the reality is that no matter how careful we are, with millions and millions and millions of gallons being pumped in this state monthly, we are going to have damage to the environment"

In addition to the environmental impact, there is also a major economic impact on the more than 350 businesses, most Oklahoma-based, that provide cleanup, remediation and consulting services for the polluted sites.

"Predictably, the industry will shrink some," Tucker said. "You can't reduce the revenues for even two years by 50 percent without having some impact on the industry, significant impact I would say."

Robert Keyes is president of Norman-based Associated Environmental Industries, a drilling firm that specializes in hazardous waste sites.

"I promise you it will have an impact on us," Keyes said. "We've geared up in anticipation of that."

Norman resident Rob Williams, who works for Summit Group of Oklahoma, said some of his 30 employees will certainly be in danger of losing their jobs.

"A 50 percent reduction (in funding) is a 50 percent loss of jobs in this industry," Williams said. "It equates pretty evenly. We're already gearing down, and we're really concerned with what's happening."

Williams said another drawback of scaling back the industry is that many of the qualified professionals who work in the field will leave Oklahoma to find work elsewhere and won't be in place when the funding returns to normal levels in four years.

"I already lost one professional," Williams said. "He saw the handwriting on the wall and went to Nebraska to get a job."

While Williams and other professionals whose livelihood depends on funding from the PST fund have resigned themselves to the fact that the weather center funding is a done deal, Kessler hopes the Legislature will explore other options before a deadline for federal matching funds comes on Sept. 30. Kessler wants lawmakers to consider some kind of bond issue, an appropriation from the Legislature's "Rainy Day" fund or money from the OU Foundation.

"In order for the proposed new (weather center) building to be an asset rather than a stigma, it must never be possible to say truthfully that it was built on a foundation of groundwater pollution to house the meteorological community," Kessler said.

Reporter Sean Murphy covers higher education and politics, and can be reached at 366-3539 or via e-mail at smurphy@normantranscript.com.