University may need $6 million to clean up radioactive site

LINCOLN (AP) - Despite already tough budgets, the University of Nebraska may need to dig a little deeper to find up to $6 million to cover the clean up of a radioactive site on university-owned property.

Dave Lechner, the university's vice president for business and finance, said Saturday that some of that money might need to be found as early as May when an investigator hired by the university could begin identifying soil and water contamination on the site near Mead.

In 2002, the U.S. Justice Department sued the university to decontaminate its portion of what was once the Nebraska Ordnance Plant. Bombs had been made on the site during World War II and the Korean War.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the university acquired 9,600 acres of the land near Mead after the plant had closed, Lechner said.

Since then, the university has used the land primarily for agricultural research and

storage, he said.

The university also buried radioactive medical waste on the site during the 1970s and possibly further contaminated the area by allowing pesticides to leak into the soil while cleaning farm equipment.

But two university consultants said the university's contribution to the toxic problems at the site is just a small portion of a mess caused largely by the ordnance plant, said Regent Charles Wilson of Lincoln.

The Board of Regents was briefed Friday about the ongoing negotiations with the federal government and the Environmental Protection Agency.

During the briefing, one of the consultants put the price tag at between $2 million and $6 million dollars.

"So I asked, 'If a $4 million bill suddenly lands on our desk, do we just have to cough it up?'" Wilson said. "Evidently, that's the part of it still being negotiated."

The university has not set aside a fund to deal with the cleanup, which puts it in a tough financial situation, Lechner said.

The options the university now faces are asking the state to pay the bill for them, cutting university spending, raising tuition or a combination of those choices.

University officials have already briefed the governor's office and state senators about the situation, Wilson said.

Those discussions will likely intensify as it becomes clearer how big the bill will be and when it will come due, Wilson said.

The Board of Regents may approve an agreement on the cleanup at its January meeting.

"I would hate to have the responsibility fall onto the current students," Wilson said. "So we'll have to try to seek some relief from the state, the state aid portion of the budget ... to deal with this."

But the university will likely have some significant competition for state funds.

Though state tax receipts are expected to be up 4 percent, a swarm of state-funded programs have been talking about their needs for more money.

That situation "suggests not a single storm but a series of competitive storms on the horizon," said the state's budget administrator Gerry Oligmueller.

"The competition is going to be a bit more spirited (for state funds) this time around," he said.