Raiding revenues from cleanup fund is not a solution

CERTAINLY THE Turnpike Authority is in dire need of financial assistance, but a solution offered by Stephen Silveira - to raid the revenues of the Massachusetts Underground Storage Tank Cleanup Fund - makes no sense ("There's a better solution than raising tolls," Op-ed, Oct. 11).

The UST program is a little-known but critically important quasi-insurance system whose purpose is to protect Massachusetts groundwater from gasoline and diesel fuel contamination. Service stations, many of them small, struggling independent businesses, pay annual fees to participate in a governmental program that partially funds reparation costs when a leak is detected.

Part of the gas tax used to go into a dedicated fund to support the program, but several years ago, the Legislature quietly swept this money into the general fund. The reason why, as Silveira points out, more is paid in fees than goes to reparation, is that the Legislature has failed to appropriate the money needed for reparation. As a consequence, service station operators have had to wait for months and sometimes years to be reimbursed for cleanup costs.

These fees that have been swept into the general fund are now being spent on something, but it's impossible to say what. Silveira's statement that about "half of the turnpike's current problem can be solved, within the transportation system, without further imposing higher taxes or tolls on anyone" is wrong insofar as it relies on redirecting UST receipts.

JOSEPH X. DONOVAN
Newton Highlands
The writer is the former chairman of the Massachusetts UST Administrative Review Board.