epa simpsonsTiming is everything and some folks just don’t have it – we’re looking at you Bruce Finley.

As Congress confronts Interior Secretary Sally Jewell Wednesday about her agency’s failure to adequately investigate the EPA spill at the Gold King Mine, Finley writes that the government needs more money, more money, more money to create and complete Superfunds.

This doesn’t bode well for Finley’s friends who want to turn San Juan County into a Superfund, and according to them it’s all the fault of Congress.

Congress is to blame for failing to adequately fund the EPA, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice study concluded. Federal data show funding has decreased from $2 billion a year in 1999 to around $1 billion.

Here’s a little insight as to how it’s the fault of Congress, and not the ever-expanding cleanup role the EPA carves out for itself once it has a foothold in a community and refuses to leave.

EPA officials said President Obama requested $1.15 billion for the Superfund program in fiscal year 2015. Congress appropriated $1.08 billion.

That’s about $500 million less than Obama wanted, not enough to wrap up any of Colorado’s 20 Superfund sites, some of which have been ongoing for decades, or the 1,767 sites nationwide, of which 391 have been completed.

We know it’s the popular thing for liberal kids these days to insist we throw bundles of taxpayer cash at whatever crisis de jour they have cooked up.

But all it does is confirm that creating even more of those costly boondoggles may not be the right solution for addressing abandoned mines.