Getting rid of old motor oil was a pretty simple matter in the 1950s and ’60s.

If you didn’t want to mess up your own property, you could pay a guy like George West 2 cents a gallon to take it away and dump it in an old gravel pit.

But what might have seemed like a cheap solution really was not. The bill just got deferred for a while. And, as the oil and other chemicals seeped deeper into the ground and the bedrock, it got bigger.

So big, in fact, that starting this week, you and I are being hit up to cover about $30 million of the cost. We’ll pay through a $1 fee effectively added to the cost of every oil change for the next 10 to 20 years.

George West started Portland-Bangor Waste Oil Services in 1953. His company eventually took waste oil from more than 3,000 customers around the state, including car dealerships and repair shops, industrial plants, school districts, state agencies and municipalities.

West’s primary disposal site was a gravel pit near the Maine Turnpike in Wells. He also had dumps in Casco, Plymouth, Ellsworth and Presque Isle.

It was perfectly legal to dump the oil back then. When hazardous-waste laws finally banned such dumping in 1981, the company went out of business.

West was a good businessman, and he kept excellent records. So when the dumped oil started seeping into private drinking-water wells, West had a trailer full of paperwork to help state officials track its source. Officials determined that West, who has since died, did not have the assets to clean up the mess, so liability fell to his customers.

The Wells site was cleaned up in 2001 at a total cost of about $18 million. The customers in that case, including larger corporations from southern Maine and New Hampshire, paid the cost, although a special state loan fund helped.

Some of the other four sites have been cleaned or are in the process, but the state has had more difficulty collecting the $30 million that it expects to pay for those cleanups.

In those cases, the customers that still exist are generally smaller companies, many in the hands of owners who never did business with George West. And, while the Plymouth site had far fewer customers than the Wells site, the cost of pumping polluted groundwater out of crevices in the bedrock there – a process that could take another 80 years – is huge.

Maine lawmakers rejected a proposal in 1999 to raise money for the cleanups through a fee on motor oil, saying they didn’t want to shift the cost to citizens. But, with costs mounting and cleanups lagging, the idea came back this summer and the oil-change fee passed easily.

Rep. Ted Koffman, D-Bar Harbor, who sponsored the bill along with Sen. John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, said it will ensure that the cleanups get done and remove an unreasonable burden from many small business owners. It is clearly a special case, Koffman said. “This sort of goes back to the antiquity of environmental management.”

In the meantime, it’s clearer to everyone that preventing a mess is a lot cheaper than cleaning one up. We’ll get a little reminder every 5,000 miles.

An Associated Press story has more details.

Rep. Koffman gave his view of the new fee in a column published in Maine newspapers this week.

Look here for a fact sheet posted by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

And, as always, let us know what you think.

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