EPA Nominee Shows Muted Hue of Green : Cabinet: Browner vows openness and quick action in new post. Her testimony appears designed to soften criticism that she’s too closely tied to activists.

President-elect Bill Clinton’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that she hopes to open a new era of communication between the EPA and America’s business community and to ease unnecessary delays in adopting regulations.

Carol Browner, a one-time aide to Vice President-elect Al Gore who now heads the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation, said that her experience has shown that the regulatory burden on businesses can be lifted “with little or no effect on environmental protection.”

“The adversarial relationship that now exists ignores the real complexities of environmental business problems,” she told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which is expected to confirm her appointment next week. “It creates damaging delays in the regulatory process and often unnecessarily harms business without significantly aiding the environment.”

Criticism of Browner’s nomination has come from those who expect her to be consistently in league with environmental activists, and her comments to the committee seemed designed to portray her as a pragmatist and conciliator.

At her congenial confirmation hearing, that issue was raised only once, when Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) quoted a columnist who responded to her nomination by saying that “one interest group would at least dominate its part of the bureaucracy.”

Browner, 37, replied that she will “not be dictated to or driven by alarmists.”

In Florida, she said, “we have had a policy of involving all of those not only affected by but interested in the problem we seek to address. I would certainly seek to continue that. . . . “

During the last four years, the EPA has been consistently at odds with the White House Competitiveness Council headed by Vice President Dan Quayle, which has protested what it saw as over-regulation of business. It also has been under fire from environmentalists for long delays in promulgating regulations required by law.

Browner said that the agency “must deliver quick, consistent decisions” and must “recognize the special problems of small business.”

“EPA should spend more time listening to the particular concerns of business and communities affected by environmental problems, and the EPA must recognize the value of state regulators,” she added. “And the EPA should promote, encourage and develop rewards for businesses that develop pollution prevention and recycling strategies.”

When questions turned to specific issues, however, Browner avoided taking firm positions. She declined, for example, to indicate her position on a $140-million hazardous waste incinerator in Ohio.

Fiercely opposed by environmentalists and debated through months of judicial and administrative proceedings, the facility was cleared last week to proceed with a test burn, which will set the stage for a final decision on commercial operation.

Pressed by Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), an opponent of the incinerator, Browner said she would not “prejudge the ultimate outcome.” Gore has said that the new Administration would not allow operation of the giant complex to begin until it has additional information.

Told that the Senate will conduct a major review of the much-criticized Superfund program to clean up hazardous waste sites, Browner said that she would give the program a score of seven on a scale of 10. Long delays and expense of cleaning the sites, she said, may mean that there are cases where a strategy of isolation and containment should be substituted for cleanup.