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Bringing back the federal Superfund tax and shifting gears on how agencies work on hazardous waste sites around the country could help not just the environment, but the economy, said Rep. Earl Blumenauer.

Blumenauer commented on the importance of restoring the tax, which oil and chemical companies once paid to clean up the sites, at the Superfund Research Program annual meeting at The Nines Hotel in Portland on Thursday.

There are currently listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, including several in Portland.

For 15 years starting in 1980, the Superfund tax gathered $3.8 billion in a trust fund for the EPA to work on sites all over the country. The tax expired in 1995.

Companies oppose a new tax because they say they’ve already paid into the trust fund.

But right now, the EPA Superfund program is so underfunded that work on the sites has become more about “study, stall and sue” than about actually cleaning up contamination, Blumenauer said.

“This is much less a tax than a fee,” he told the group, which was mostly comprised of university environmental researchers from around the country.

With more funding, cleanup of Superfund sites like could move work from the realm of lawyers and politicos to the realm of engineers, contractors and people with “other skill sets,” he said.

“We need to get real about the EPA,” Blumenauer told the group. “We need to resource it. We need to work with them to clean up ambiguity.”

Another problem has been a micromanaging of individual steps for each Superfund site cleanup effort, he said.

“We need to move to something more performance driven,” he said. “We need to manage results.”

Blumenauer has been trying to reinstate the tax for about three years, but he admitted that he’s not sure how well it will go over in the new Congress.

Still, it makes more sense that the program be funded by companies that had a hand in creating contamination at the sites than it does to make the public pay for cleanups, he said.

“It’s time to end the free ride,” Blumenauer said.