Tackling Environmental Liability
Scott Lockert and his friend Jeff Andrilenas were working as financial risk analysts in 2005 when they noticed that the failure to address liabilities surrounding natural resource damages on waterways was preventing comprehensive solutions from being put in place.
Not only was cleanup taking longer than necessary, but businesses liable under Superfund law were finding difficulty in transferring or selling property. They were also having trouble getting loans because their liability was considered a risk.
Lockert and Andrilenas, geologists by training, decided businesses needed a new way to settle a portion of their Superfund liability that didn’t involve time-consuming litigation. In 2006, they joined Earl Scott and Shawn Severn in founding Bluefield Holdings Inc., which uses a credit system to help businesses settle Superfund liabilities efficiently and less expensively, outside court.
Similar approaches have been used in mitigation banking schemes nationwide, but Bluefield’s credit system creates one large, shared habitat that can be used by several businesses, rather than approaching restoration piecemeal. Bluefield also oversees habitat creation on leased public lands in response to existing Superfund damage, rather than on private lands in anticipation of construction.
Lockert, who serves as vice president of Northwest operations, says Bluefield is testing its model with the Lower Duwamish Superfund site cleanup, though he believes its product has universal applicability. Bluefield has already expanded operations into New Jersey, where Andrilenas runs the company’s satellite office, with the intent of expanding nationwide.
Seattle, however, will be the proving ground for Bluefield’s business model. A decade ago, the EPA listed Seattle’s lower Duwamish waterway as a federal Superfund site, placing the river with more than 1,000 other sites on a register of the country’s most polluted places. Despite the classification, cleanup has been slow to occur: As late as last year, local businesses were still accidentally dumping contaminants into the water. The cleanup of “Slip 4,” one of the most contaminated hot spots on the river, only began last October.
One thing that has made it difficult to address the problem has been an offshoot of Superfund legislation called Natural Resource Damage (NRD) law, which requires polluters to offset any lost use of contaminated property by wildlife or people. This use essentially amounts to a loss of services—recreational, commercial and ecological—from the land and water, which must be offset by additional restoration in the form of habitat creation, a requirement that can take years to fulfill. Bluefield’s goal is to
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