The Investigative Journal’s weekly audit of federal and state environmental enforcement actions, based on public dockets, press releases, and Federal Register notices.
Federal environmental enforcement this week was dominated by Superfund cost-recovery settlements moving through bankruptcy court and the Federal Register, while fresh Q1 2026 compliance data showed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on a measurably different tempo than in recent years. According to an enforcement roundup compiled by industry publication EHS Leaders, the agency finalized 91 civil settlement agreements during the first quarter of 2026 totaling roughly $3.37 million in federal penalties — a modest figure on a historical basis, but one that arrived alongside a continuing pipeline of CERCLA cost-recovery filings tied to older sites, several of them moving through bankruptcy proceedings where the United States must compete with private creditors for a finite pool of funds. Records filed in the Federal Register, EPA public notices, and the Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division docket indicate a week that favored settlement over litigation, with the bulk of the newly lodged agreements concentrated in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Connecticut, Arizona, and New Jersey.
The Investigative Journal reviewed enforcement dockets and notices published between April 2 and April 24, 2026. What follows is a weekly digest of the most consequential actions, penalty amounts where disclosed, compliance obligations imposed on defendants, and patterns worth continued scrutiny.
1. Congoleum Corporation bankruptcy settlement — Henderson Road and Spectron Superfund Sites
The Department of Justice on April 22 lodged a proposed settlement in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey resolving the United States’ CERCLA claims against Congoleum Corporation — now known as CC Oldco Corporation — together with Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and the Liquidation Trust for Old Congoleum. According to the Federal Register notice, the agreement grants the United States an allowed claim of $423,169.50 for costs incurred at the Henderson Road Site and $26,154.91 for the Spectron Site, a listed Superfund location in Cecil County, Maryland.
Under the terms on file, Liberty Mutual is to pay the allowed amounts in full, and the United States covenants not to sue either Old Congoleum or the Liquidation Trust for Sections 106 or 107 liability at the two sites. The settlement is structured to close out environmental claims against a defunct corporate estate while extracting some insurance-backed recovery for prior cleanup work. Public comments on the proposed agreement are open for 30 days from publication.
Filings indicate this is a classic bankruptcy-driven CERCLA resolution: the federal government trades a covenant not to sue for a modest cash recovery underwritten by an insurer’s legacy policies. The compromise highlights a recurring tension in Superfund enforcement — when responsible parties enter liquidation, the government frequently recovers cents on the dollar, and the remainder of cleanup cost falls on the public fisc or other potentially responsible parties.
2. Tucson International Airport Area Superfund Site — administrative settlement with City of Tucson
The EPA on April 16 published notice of a proposed administrative settlement with the City of Tucson, Arizona, to conduct response actions at the Tucson International Airport Area (TIAA) Superfund Site. The TIAA site, listed on the National Priorities List since 1983, covers a large groundwater plume contaminated primarily with trichloroethylene (TCE) and 1,4-dioxane attributable to decades of defense-aviation operations.
Records suggest the settlement structures the city’s role in further removal action at the site and its obligations as an operator of remediation infrastructure. Because the TIAA cleanup is one of the oldest continuing Superfund matters in the American Southwest, settlements of this kind typically carry long-tail implementation schedules and periodic revisions as groundwater data evolve.
The case is particularly relevant to environmental-justice watchers: the affected plume underlies South Tucson neighborhoods where, according to prior EPA environmental-justice screening, residents are disproportionately Hispanic and lower-income. Any slippage in municipal response obligations would merit closer inspection.
3. Safety Light Corporation Site — $600,000 cost recovery from Isolite Corporation
The EPA on April 9 announced a proposed CERCLA cost-recovery settlement for the Safety Light Corporation Superfund Site in Bloomsburg, Columbia County, Pennsylvania — a legacy radioactive site where radium-based instruments were produced for decades. According to the Federal Register notice, Isolite Corporation agreed to pay $600,000 plus interest accrued through the date of publication.
The Safety Light site is one of the most technically complex in EPA’s Region 3 portfolio because it involves residual radium and tritium contamination that predates the modern regulatory regime. Cost-recovery actions against named parties help replenish the Superfund trust fund used to finance work where no viable responsible party can be compelled to pay.
Attribution chain: the settlement was noticed by EPA under CERCLA Section 122(h), and Isolite’s payment is conditioned on a standard public-comment window. The amount, while modest in comparison to the cleanup budget, is meaningful for a site long plagued by orphan-cost exposure.
4. Baghurst Drive Superfund Site — settlement filed for Montgomery County, PA
The EPA on April 2 published a proposed CERCLA administrative settlement agreement and order on consent for the Baghurst Drive Superfund Site in Upper Salford Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Comments on the agreement are open through May 4, 2026.
The Baghurst Drive site, added to the National Priorities List in the 2010s, involves residential well contamination with chlorinated solvents. Administrative settlements at such sites typically require the settling party to perform supplemental removal work, provide cost recovery, or both. The Baghurst agreement follows a recognizable EPA Region 3 model of pursuing smaller-dollar de minimis or de micromis settlements to close out secondary responsible parties without triggering lengthy litigation.
The case warrants continued monitoring because it sits within a cluster of chlorinated-solvent groundwater sites that Pennsylvania’s environmental regulators have flagged for accelerated remediation in 2026.
5. Lakes Parkway Lithium Battery Fire Superfund Site — Georgia cost recovery
The EPA on April 3 noticed a proposed cost-recovery settlement at the Lakes Parkway Lithium Battery Fire Superfund Site in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Comments on the proposed settlement are open through May 4.
The Lakes Parkway site is a recent addition to EPA’s Superfund inventory and is emblematic of a fast-growing category of enforcement: Clean-up and cost-recovery tied to lithium-ion battery fires. According to an EPA public notice, the settlement recovers response costs incurred by EPA for emergency removal activities after the fire. Lithium-battery sites raise novel cleanup issues — fluorinated electrolyte residues, heavy-metal contamination from anode and cathode materials, and fire-suppression wastewater.
This is a pattern TIJ has flagged previously: EPA’s enforcement posture toward new-energy supply-chain facilities is still forming, and the pace of lithium-ion incidents nationally has outrun the regulatory architecture.
6. Price-Driscoll Site — $346,567 CERCLA cost recovery in Waterford, CT
The EPA on April 2 published a proposed CERCLA administrative cost-recovery settlement for the Price-Driscoll Site in Waterford, Connecticut. Under the terms disclosed in the Federal Register, the settling party agrees to pay EPA $346,567, with payment due within seven days after the effective date.
Records indicate the Price-Driscoll matter is another cost-recovery closeout tied to an older removal action. The settlement’s accelerated payment window — seven days after effective date — is slightly unusual and suggests either settling-party liquidity concerns or an EPA desire to preserve Superfund receipts against fiscal year-end accounting.
Connecticut state environmental regulators have not announced a parallel state action, but the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection retains co-regulator authority over the site’s groundwater plume.
7. Consent decree modification: City of Columbia, South Carolina — Clean Water Act
The Department of Justice on March 30 lodged a proposed material modification to a standing Clean Water Act consent decree with the City of Columbia, South Carolina. According to the Federal Register notice, the 2014 decree resolved alleged Clean Water Act violations stemming from the city’s sanitary-sewer and wastewater-treatment operations.
The modification requires Columbia to complete four additional sewer-capacity projects by January 1, 2029, and postpones certain deadlines associated with the capacity assurance program negotiated in the original decree. Municipal CWA consent decrees are long-lived instruments; schedule slippage is common, but federal regulators typically impose supplemental projects or stipulated penalties to offset delay.
Data shows that sanitary-sewer overflow (SSO) decrees of this sort remain among EPA’s most durable compliance levers, and the Columbia modification indicates the federal government is willing to extend timelines in exchange for concrete capacity additions rather than releasing a municipality from obligations entirely.
8. Q1 2026 civil penalties — what the numbers show
Q1 civil-enforcement data compiled by industry analysts from EPA’s public dockets indicate $3,369,398 in federal penalties issued across 91 settlements. EHS Leaders reported that the largest single penalty, $781,175, was assessed against a Kansas building-materials manufacturer for Clean Air Act violations tied to its Class I operating permit and hazardous-air-pollutant regulations. A Florida-based HVAC company paid $370,000 to resolve FIFRA violations, and a Hawaii-based environmental-services company paid $165,000 for RCRA violations. Other notable Q1 resolutions included a $108,853 TSCA export-violations penalty against a California chemical manufacturer and a $100,675 RCRA penalty against an Illinois safety-equipment company.
Sector patterns: Q1 data shows heavier Clean Air Act activity than the prior quarter, with building-materials and HVAC sectors accounting for a material share of the dollar totals; FIFRA and TSCA cases remained dominated by distributor misbranding and unpermitted export matters. Criminal enforcement numbers, however, remain modest. According to prior EPA reporting cited in Holland & Knight’s FY 2026 budget analysis, the administration’s proposed fiscal-year 2026 budget reduced EPA criminal-enforcement funding by roughly 49 percent, a figure that contextualizes the agency’s continued reliance on civil settlements over criminal referrals.
Backdrop: $668 million Lower Duwamish settlement still looms over enforcement landscape
While the headline weekly filings skewed to smaller cost-recovery matters, the largest environmental settlement of the year remains the $668 million Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund settlement, announced in early March 2026. Under its terms, the Lower Duwamish Waterway Group — consisting of The Boeing Company, the City of Seattle, and King County — is responsible for designing and performing the in-water cleanup for the five-mile Duwamish segment, which EPA has identified as contaminated with PCBs, arsenic, carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxins, and furans, among other hazardous substances. The Group is projected to receive roughly $130 million from other responsible parties and approximately $140 million from federal agencies to offset the work.
The Duwamish cleanup frames the current enforcement environment: the federal government remains willing to structure multi-hundred-million-dollar remediation deals involving large numbers of potentially responsible parties, but civil penalty receipts are smaller in aggregate than in recent years.
Actions that warrant deeper TIJ investigation
Three threads from this week’s docket merit follow-up reporting. First, the Congoleum bankruptcy-court settlement raises familiar questions about whether CERCLA’s covenant-not-to-sue structure provides adequate recovery for taxpayers when responsible parties enter liquidation; filings indicate the government is again accepting modest insurance-backed recoveries. Second, the Lakes Parkway lithium-battery fire site represents a growing category of enforcement that has not yet been addressed by coherent federal regulation; TIJ will continue tracking CERCLA cost-recovery filings at battery-storage and battery-manufacturing incidents. Third, the Columbia, South Carolina consent-decree modification is one of several municipal Clean Water Act decrees undergoing schedule revisions this year, and TIJ intends to audit stipulated-penalty ledgers across Region 4 municipalities to assess how often such extensions are tied to enforceable milestones rather than aspirational benchmarks.
All pending matters noted above remain subject to public comment and court approval. None of the actions described are final adjudications of liability beyond what the Federal Register notices specify.
Sources: Federal Register notices dated April 2, 3, 9, 16, and 22, 2026; EPA Civil and Cleanup Enforcement Cases and Settlements; EPA ECHO database; DOJ ENRD Proposed Consent Decrees; EHS Leaders Q1 2026 enforcement roundup.