Getting the Job Done: Resolving State- Federal Conflicts in Superfund

The American system of federalism creates frequent opportunities for clashes between state and federal environmental regulators. State and federal environmental laws overlap but are not easily reconciled. Most federal environmental law provides no clear answer as to how to reconcile differing mandates of state and federal environmental regulators. In this article, we will examine these state-federal conflicts as they played out in 1994 in, the cleanup of contaminated sites in the state of Washington. This article describes the way a regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency and the state's Department of Ecology developed a novel approach to managing the essential tension between overlapping state and federal cleanup laws.