- Locals have been pushing for more aggressive solutions to the Gelman plume since a University of Michigan graduate student discovered it in 1984.
- But Gelman is not required to clean up the plume. Instead, the state and Gelman manage the contamination through a decades-old legal agreement. Locals don’t have any direct input in what that looks like.
- Advocates hoped that intervention from the U.S. EPA would bring the change they had been fighting for. But the agency’s future under Trump’s second administration is unclear.
After decades of trying to push for change from below, local officials and advocates want to leapfrog the state of Michigan and have the federal government take over management of the Gelman site of 1,4-dioxane groundwater contamination on Ann Arbor's west side and Scio Township. But the Trump administration has been making changes to the Environmental Protection Agency that have advocates worried.
Washtenaw County Commissioner Yousef Rabhi is one of those advocates. He said the plume has been an important part of his career.
“I have seen government work for the people when it comes to this issue,” he said. “And I've seen government not work for the people when it comes to this issue.”
Pushing state officials for more aggressive cleanup has often been frustrating, said Kathy Knol, a trustee for Scio Township, where the plume originated.
“I feel I have a voice now, but it's taken years to get to this point,” she said. Knol has been a member of the township board since 2016.
She’s their contact for the Gelman plume, which originated at 600 S. Wagner Road just within the township’s boundaries. Knol has seen how local attempts to remediate the contamination have gained momentum — and stopped dead in their tracks.
Rabhi and Knol have spent the last year waiting for the EPA to announce whether the Gelman site will be added to the federal Superfund program. A decision was due this spring, but they’re still waiting.
The EPA is a better choice for a full cleanup because other remediation efforts have been “hamstrung” by the 1992 legal agreement between Gelman and the state, Rabhi said.
Local officials and advocates have little say in that agreement, which is supposed to hold Gelman accountable. The consent judgment — a court-supervised agreement reached to resolve a civil suit — represents a veritable brick wall for locals who feel the state isn’t adequately protecting their health.
A low trust factor
The agreement is the result of the state’s 1988 lawsuit against Gelman. It has endured for over three decades, through four amendments and three cleanup criteria changes.
It requires Gelman to manage the spread of dioxane in cooperation with the state’s environmental regulators. That includes pumping and treating groundwater to levels below 7.2 parts per billion (ppb), the state’s cleanup criterion for dioxane. But the company assumed no liability for the contamination.
The agreement serves as the agency’s enforcement tool against Gelman, said Chris Svoboda, the site’s project manager with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
“We use that to keep [Gelman] in compliance,” he said. The consent judgment lays out Gelman’s responsibilities in great detail.
But a consent judgment limits the state’s regulatory and enforcement powers, said Andy Buchsbaum, an environmental law lecturer at the University of Michigan.
“The challenge with the consent judgment is it takes both parties to consent,” he said. “So you wind up with actions that may not be as protective as you'd want to see.”
As an equal party in negotiations, it’s harder for the state to compel Gelman to do something it doesn’t want to do.
For example, locals asked for more monitoring to track the plume in 2024, including testing more residential wells that aren’t officially part of the plume. The state declined to push for more funds from Gelman.
“We are in a stage where I think we have good cooperation with Gelman and their side,” Svoboda said. “And that has not always been the case. And I think that from the state’s perspective, it's a good thing to have this cooperative, collaborative relationship. EGLE making legal overtures like 'you need to pay more,' I don't necessarily know would be that conducive to keeping that relationship cooperative."
From a resident’s perspective, that kind of agreement is hard to trust, Buchsbaum said.
“It'd be very difficult for anybody who's on the ground to trust an agreement agreed to by the perpetrator,” he said. “That doesn't mean necessarily it's a bad agreement, but it's just the trust factor would be very difficult to get unless you're part of the process.”
The result is an agreement that was never intended to clean up the contamination — just to contain it. That’s the main source of tension between advocates and state regulators, Svoboda said.
“We [EGLE] want to make sure people aren't exposed and people aren't harmed,” he said. “But unfortunately, the goal is not to completely remediate the aquifer.”
EGLE is following the consent judgment and doing its job, Svoboda said. He said that’s enough to protect the health of the community and the environment.
Rabhi and Knol don’t see it that way.
“They're arguing they are meeting our current requirements in Michigan, which is correct,” Knol said. “But it could be so much better.”
Rabhi was a bit more blunt.
“I would not consider that what they have been doing is actually protecting human health,” he said. But that’s because state regulators don’t have the tools they need to do it, he said.
“Because of the way that our state laws are structured, even our state agencies are not well equipped to actually protect the public on these issues,” he said.
But for advocates, that’s not enough. That’s why several local governments attempted to intervene in the latest round of negotiations between the state and Gelman.
But Gelman argued that the intervenors had no legal standing in negotiations and insisted that the process remain between the company and the state.
After several years of back and forth, an appellate court judge agreed. In 2022, the court ruled that the intervenors weren’t eligible to participate in that round of negotiations. The state and Gelman wrapped up the new consent judgment in spring of 2023 — without local input.
“It's often so important for the residents who are most affected to be part of whatever negotiations occur between the state and the perpetrator,” Buchsbaum said. “And that usually does not happen.”
“It is absurd to not stop the plume.”
At this point, Knol and Rabhi feel they’ll have better success with the federal government.
“I think many people believe that the best potential outcome we can get for this spreading contamination will come through [the Environmental Protection Agency],” Knol said.
Rabhi advocates for local officials to continue pushing for more action while appealing to federal regulators. But EPA intervention is preferable to the state’s current involvement, he said.
“The only way to take the chemicals out of the ground is to get the EPA involved, because [the state] has basically no ability to do it legally,” he said.
That’s been whistleblower Dan Bicknell’s solution for years.
“Gelman has not been managing the plume properly,” he said. “They've allowed the plume to expand into residential wells and they have no proper equipment to halt the plume and restore the aquifer to drinking water criteria.”
Bicknell discovered the contamination in 1984 and petitioned the county to test private wells near the Gelman site in 1985. A county official said at the time that Bicknell’s push for more testing was the only reason officials looked into the full extent of the contamination. Bicknell has stayed involved ever since.
“It is absurd to not stop the plume,” he said. Gelman is depriving the city of a clean water source by not cleaning it up, he said.
“You have a proper source of water in this pristine aquifer. You shouldn't allow it to be degraded,” he said. “You should allow it to be used in the future.”
The city currently relies heavily on Barton Pond, an impoundment of the Huron River, for drinking water. That’s already been polluted with PFAS, which the city has spent millions to filter out. Lack of clean groundwater increases costs for city residents and makes it harder for the city to provide clean drinking water, Rabhi said.
The plume hasn’t hit the pond, but the city has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing for that possibility. Ann Arbor Water spent $200,000 to install additional monitoring wells and $50,000 on a facility plan study on dioxane. Quarterly testing of the pond for dioxane costs about $20,000 yearly, according to the city.
The EPA could remediate the aquifer back to usable condition, Bicknell said.
Superfund bound?
In March 2024, the EPA proposed adding the Gelman site to the National Priorities List, colloquially known as “Superfund.” The program identifies and remediates severely contaminated properties across the country. Federal law puts legal accountability for costs and cleanup on any party potentially responsible for contamination at the site. If no involved party is financially solvent, the federal government pays for it.
That’s not uncommon. Contaminated sites often find their way onto the list because they are “orphaned,” meaning the party or parties that owned the site no longer exist.
Gelman has been purchased by larger corporations twice in the past 30 years. Pall Life Sciences, now Pall Corporation, bought Gelman in 1997. Danaher, a multi-billion dollar life sciences corporation, bought Pall in 2015. None of the three companies responded to repeated requests for comment over email, phone and mail.
Gelman has argued that full cleanup of the aquifer isn’t feasible. The company maintains that the plume does not pose a threat to public health — because residents aren’t allowed to use the contaminated groundwater.
The EPA has assessed the Gelman site twice before, in 1986 and 2017. After the 2017 assessment, the EPA told local officials that the site was eligible for Superfund status. But to move forward, the EPA needs state buy-in.
Then-Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, declined to pursue EPA intervention. In 2021, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, requested the site be placed on the National Priorities List.
That’s why the site is finally being considered, said Erica Aultz, the National Priorities List coordinator for the site.
“The state of Michigan had decided that they feel that the EPA and their authorities [were] the best tool to address the contamination at this site,” she said. “It will not proceed to this point [of listing] without state support.”
Each site proposed for the list has a 90-day public comment period. That period closed in May 2024 for the Gelman site.
Since then, the EPA has been reviewing over 150 comments left by residents, local officials, advocacy groups and Gelman itself on the agency’s proposal to add the site to the list. The agency expected to issue a response to comments and a decision this spring, Aultz said.
But the EPA may have delayed Superfund listing decisions. That’s according to Joshua Mosher, Assistant Director of the Remediation and Redevelopment division at EGLE. EPA staff told him all listing decisions for spring 2024 had been delayed until the fall, he said at the March 2025 meeting of the Coalition for Action on Remediation of Dioxane (CARD).
“It’s nothing specific with Gelman, it’s the whole process,” he said at the meeting. “It’s all we know right now; any additions to the NPL are delayed right now.”
EGLE confirmed Mosher’s source was the EPA itself. But when we reached out to EPA to confirm, an agency spokesperson said they “[do] not have any information about a possible delay.”
Even if the site is listed, it’s unclear how the EPA will address advocates’ concerns. Spokespeople for the EPA could not make promises about how the program would address specific sites, including the plume.
And each stage of the National Priorities process can take years. Bicknell pointed out that’s in the cards for the Gelman plume regardless of who is managing the site.
“This is a long journey to get to a proper cleanup,” he said.
What would happen to the consent judgment?
Adding the site to the Superfund list would transfer enforcement responsibilities to the federal government. Advocates hope that stronger liability provisions in federal law would force Gelman to do more about the plume.
But it is unclear whether that would definitively override the consent judgment currently governing the site.
Bicknell is sure it would. Buchsbaum, the environmental lawyer, isn’t so sure. And neither are the state nor the EPA.
When asked what effect EPA intervention would have on the consent judgment, spokespeople for the EPA responded with the same answer that was found on the EPA’s FAQ for the site: “If the Gelman Sciences, Inc. site is listed on the [National Priorities List, NPL], at that time, EPA would become the lead enforcement agency and would coordinate with Michigan on how to smoothly transition the enforcement lead to EPA.”
That FAQ also said: “EPA has not taken a position on the specific terms of the consent judgment and cannot dictate its terms. If EPA pursues listing the site on the NPL, EPA will not require that the state court litigation end or the terms of the consent judgment be changed.”
The FAQ was removed in February 2025.
EGLE, the state’s environmental department, pointed to the state attorney general’s office, which works with Gelman to interpret and negotiate the consent judgment. The attorney general’s office declined to answer questions about the consent judgment’s future under the EPA. The office then pointed us back to EGLE and the EPA.
If the site is approved, anyone who commented on the listing proposal has 90 days to legally contest the EPA’s decision, Aultz said at the June 2024 coalition meeting. That includes Gelman. But that wouldn’t stop the process from moving forward, the EPA confirmed.
EPA under Trump's second term
It’s also unclear how the Superfund program as a whole will fare under a second Trump presidency. Advocates worry the delay is the result of changing priorities at the agency.
The President is committed to cleaning up polluted sites, the EPA said in a statement in February. A spokesperson cited the number of sites deleted from the Superfund list during Trump’s first term.
Deleting a site from the list is the penultimate stage of the Superfund process, when the agency determines if the site is safe enough for reuse.
But Superfund sites often take decades to remediate, and several of those sites were removed thanks to work done during previous administrations. And previous administrations didn’t measure success by counting deletions.
While the EPA under then-Trump appointee Scott Pruitt did push for cleanup at some sites, those tended to be sites ideal for redevelopment, rather than the most toxic sites.
And by the end of Trump’s first term, Superfund sites languished due to lack of funding, creating the largest backlog of sites ready for cleanup but without funding in 15 years. Trump then proposed cutting the EPA’s funding by 26% in 2020.
Project 2025 suggests the EPA should focus on “short-term cleanups” and prioritize “economic opportunities” that remediation could bring. The plan also suggests revisiting emerging contaminants like PFAS and allowing potentially responsible parties to conduct their own five-year reviews of Superfund cleanups.
Plus, there’s concern the administration could cut staff at the Region 5 office, which oversees Michigan’s Superfund sites. In late February, Trump said the EPA would be cutting 65% of its staff. But he didn’t provide specifics about which departments or regions would be affected. Later, the White House said instead, the EPA budget would be cut by 65%.
When asked to confirm, the EPA directed Michigan Public to the White House. When asked for details, the White House referred Michigan Public back to the EPA.
The prospect of a weaker EPA has advocates worried.
Rita Loch-Caruso, professor emeritus of toxicology at the University of Michigan, said she trusts EPA staff — but not the Trump administration officials running the agency.
“It's hard to feel optimistic when the EPA administrator just is effusive about cutting regulations,” she said. Loch-Caruso is also a board member of CARD.
In a statement, the EPA said Zeldin was committed “to the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment.”
Marianne Martin, who lives in a neighborhood where drinking water was contaminated with Gelman’s dioxane in the 1980s, said she doesn’t believe the Trump administration.
“I don't trust one minute of what [Trump’s] doing,” she said. She’s concerned cuts to the EPA could mean the end of the Superfund program.
“Without that, and without the push to make [the EPA] more effective, it's going to be a lot more neighborhoods like this all over,” Martin said.
The path forward
While local groups haven’t had much luck, government officials credit advocates like CARD and Dan Bicknell.
EGLE’s Chris Svoboda has been involved with the Gelman site for about two years. He said organizations like the coalition have made a difference.
“In my time here, the citizen advocates have definitely been a strong force for progress and getting things done,” he said. “I really think that they've had a huge impact throughout the whole course of the project.”
That’s unusual for a site that hasn’t been designated a Superfund site yet, said Anthony Mcglown, the EPA remedial project manager for the site.
“A really unique aspect of this site is just the community involvement that's been around this site for decades prior to EPA's involvement,” he said. Citizens usually get involved in a Superfund site after it has been added to the National Priorities List, not before, he said.
The EPA would continue tapping into that energy with a community involvement plan, Mcglown said. It’s part of the Superfund process.
“Those are tailored specifically to that site and that community,” Mcglown said. “And the important key first task in development of that plan is to go out and conduct community interviews to get the community feedback on how they would like us to engage.”
While EPA intervention is the best bet for the Gelman site, the state still needs to address the wider problem of industrial contamination, Rabhi said.
“We're not unique in the state in terms of problems like this,” he said. There are over 18,000 contaminated sites in Michigan (Gelman is one of them).
That’s thanks to the state’s history of heavy manufacturing. State environmental laws are woefully under-equipped to protect the public, advocates have argued.
In late 2024, a package of bills that would overhaul Michigan’s pollution cleanup regulations failed to pass the state House even though Democrats held a majority. The bill’s sponsors hope to continue negotiating with industry stakeholders and environmental groups this year, said State Senator Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor.
“I'm hopeful that we can reintroduce those bills pretty soon here, based on the progress and the trajectory that we had last fall,” he said. But Republican control of the House represents a potential “headwind,” Irwin said.
Rabhi is less optimistic about the legislation, but said he isn’t giving up. He wants to change how the government approaches regulating chemicals, especially emerging contaminants like dioxane.
“We should assume the worst,” Rabhi said. “We should assume that they're poisonous to us, until we can prove that they're not.”
Lester Graham contributed reporting to this story.
