Wetlands Studies Withheld, Officials Say : Environment: White House urged EPA to suppress analyses showing vast areas would lose protection under proposed rules, according to sources.

The Environmental Protection Agency, at the urging of the White House, is withholding conclusions showing that vast stretches of the nation’s wetlands would lose federal protection under new guidelines proposed by the Bush Administration, officials said Saturday.

The studies by four government agencies suggest that 50% or more of the nation’s 100 million acres of wetlands, including large sections of the Everglades and Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, could be opened to development, said an Administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Some people at the EPA are “livid” about White House pressure to suppress the conclusions, the official said. He said the EPA’s general counsel has told the White House that the conclusions should be made public.

An EPA source, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “it would seem appropriate that all the information the EPA relies on in coming to its final decision should be made public.”

President Bush, on Aug. 9, proposed new rules governing wetlands development, with one key change being that protected wetlands must have standing water for 15 days or saturation to the surface for 21 days during the growing season.

The existing rules, adopted in 1989, said that there had to be water within 18 inches of the surface for seven days during the growing season.

Conservationists accused Bush of abandoning a 1988 pledge to achieve “no net loss” in wetlands acreage. But the President, in defending his new policy, said: “A pothole in the back yard is not wetlands.”

Wetlands are swamps, bogs, marshes and prairie potholes recognized by environmentalists as vital for water quality, wildlife habitat and protection from flood damage.

The EPA, Fish and Wildlife Service, Army Corps of Engineers and Agriculture Department have dispatched 52 teams to 450 sites around the country in order to assess the effects of the Bush proposal.

Both raw material, running to 6,000 pages, and data analyses originally were to have been made public last Friday, with the publication date later moved to Wednesday.

But a middle-level EPA official, at the prompting of top White House officials including Teresa Gorman of the Domestic Policy Council, on Nov. 1 issued a memo instructing EPA’s 10 regional offices not to release the analyses. The raw data is still scheduled to come out Wednesday.

LaJuana Wilcher, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, said: “We are in the process of having discussions about what information should be released.

“Clearly we intend to provide (it) for public review and subsequent public comment,” she said, adding, “we at the EPA are very concerned about what the data is showing.”

The sources said that other areas that might be in danger of losing protection were the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, large tracts of wetlands in the Pacific Northwest and swampland in Maine.

“The initial indications are that the EPA is going to have to go back and take a very, very serious look” at the Bush proposals, the Administration official said.