Spill Poses Immediate Challenge for New Cal/EPA

A new state environmental agency was born Wednesday, just in time to deal with a disastrous pesticide spill in the Sacramento River.

Despite threats in the Assembly to scuttle Gov. Pete Wilson’s plan to create the California Environmental Protection Agency, a coalition of conservative Republicans and farm-area Democrats fell far short of mustering the votes needed to kill it late Tuesday night.

Within hours of the birth of Cal/EPA, the governor swore in James M. Strock, formerly chief enforcement officer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to head the new agency. One of Strock’s first tasks will be to deal with the 19,000 gallons of a toxic pesticide that spilled Sunday into the river above Lake Shasta, a source of drinking water for millions of Californians.

“This week up in the Sacramento River, we’ve seen just how fragile our natural treasures are when poisoned by man-made hazards,” Wilson told reporters just before the swearing-in. The new agency will be “a new weapon in the battle to protect our resources,” the governor said.

The creation of Cal/EPA fulfills one of Wilson’s major campaign promises, and he noted that had the new agency had been in place earlier, the freight train accident that spewed the highly toxic pesticide metam-sodium into the river near Dunsmuir might have been foreseen and prevented.

But both critics and supporters of the new agency agree that its creation is more symbol than substance. They say additional legislation will be required to define its authority and give the agency’s secretary the clout needed to make a significant difference.

Wilson, however, was clearly grateful to see the new agency survive, especially when its future appeared to be linked to negotiations on the state’s $55.7-billion budget.

For a time this week, critics of the governor’s proposal to form Cal/EPA were saying they had the votes needed to kill it. That would have taken a majority vote of either the Assembly or the Senate. Instead, under the state executive reorganization statute, the new agency automatically became law at the stroke of midnight Tuesday.

In the Assembly, conservative Republicans and farm-area Democrats had been poised for a vote just before the deadline. Assemblyman Rusty Areias (D-Los Banos) thought he might have enough support to kill the agency.

“You can’t believe the coalition on this one,” he told reporters as he waited for the chance to move a resolution that had been signed by three Democrats and 15 Republicans. The farm district Democrat was upset that the Wilson plan would remove the regulation of pesticides from the Department of Food and Agriculture, which has long been seen as favorable to agricultural interests.

Conservative Republicans were unhappy with the plan for the same reason, while some environmentalists feared the proposed agency would be too subject to political pressure to make scientific judgments about the safety of chemicals.

But Areias never took his chance to kill the plan. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) called a meeting of Democratic members just after the final votes on two crucial budget measures.

More than an hour later, Areias had dropped his plan to introduce the measure to scuttle the agency.

With the deadline approaching, Assemblyman Phillip Wyman (R-Tehachapi) moved that the Republican governor’s plan for the new agency be rejected.

The measure failed 43 to 14, with Areias joining 13 Republicans in opposition.

Areias said he dropped his fight against the agency because “once it gets elevated to that level, there’s nothing you can do. Obviously the Speaker and the governor got together.”

But Brown and several other Assembly Democrats denied that any sort of deal was made with the governor.