(Source: MIRS.news, Published 12/13/2024) Legislation known as “polluter pay,” bills designed to crack down on entities that pollute property and don't clean it up, passed the Senate shortly after 5 a.m. Friday morning, a win for environmentalists who have long sought the policy.

Introduced more than a year ago, SB 605 - SB 611 lay out the process of identifying the polluter, how to hold them accountable, how the public can get involved and how those exposed to pollution can seek relief for damages or injury.

The bills have sat untouched in the Senate Energy and Environment Committee since October, but were discharged from committee early Friday morning and passed on party-line votes.

“These bills will add needed transparency to our cleanup laws,” wrote Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor) to MIRS. "This protects clean water and especially property owners who live near polluted sites.

“This policy also promises to reduce the number of orphaned sites in the future. After an extensive workgroup process, we were able to narrow these bills to improve cleanups in Michigan while continuing to enable Michigan's leading brownfield development program.”

The bills' sudden appearance on the Senate floor, however, spurred an angry reaction from Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt (R-Lawton), who predicted the bills would cost businesses “billions of dollars" while chasing away prospective brownfield site developers.

“These bills, in essence, send the message that all businesses are bad actors, and that only giving massive new control to an environmental regulatory agency and a new bureaucracy is the only way we can fix this in Michigan,” he said. “It doesn't work and, unfortunately, Democrats are more interested in appeasing radical environmental ideology than reasonable cleanup regulations and putting factories back in order.”

Polluter pay laws were referenced by Progress Michigan executive director Sam Inglot during an interview with Michigan's Big Show starring Michael Patrick Shiels as among the bills he'd most like to see get passed in lame duck. He said businesses that pollute the environment, not Michigan taxpayers, should be charged with the cleanup.

The bills that passed were:

- SB 605 is a 76-page substitute that lays out how a property owner can file a pollution complaint and how a current or former property owner found responsible for that pollution is supposed to pay for the cleanup and the extent to which the property is cleaned up.

 - SB 606 is a 44-page substitute that lays out how the public can file comments on polluted property and the process someone who is found to have polluted a property must follow to be squared up with environmental officials.

 - SB 607 without a substitute makes it clear that the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) is in charge of crafting the cleanup criteria and detection limits.

 - SB 608 without a substitute requires dry cleaners and any other businesses that need to file a pollution incident prevention plan post a bond or some other financial assurances that they can cover the cost of at least some remediation if needed.

 - SB 609 without a substitute deals with old brownfield sites that were polluted before 1994, long before modern-day environmental regulations.

 - SB 610 allows a person who was exposed to pollution, but may not be showing signs of injury or disease to file a claim against a polluter for damages under certain circumstances.

 - SB 611 lays out the timeframe under which someone can file a claim for damages due to contact with pollution.