EPA to Adopt Compromise on Wetlands : Development: Environmentalists declare new regulations a victory. Quayle fails to reduce protected acreage.

After two years of squabbling within the Bush Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it will adopt compromise regulations largely favored by environmental groups to protect wetlands.

EPA Administrator William K. Reilly made the decision without White House consultation, rejecting proposals by Vice President Dan Quayle’s staff that would have substantially reduced the number of bogs, marshes, swamps and other wetlands that are protected, an EPA staff member said.

“In the face of numerous challenges and numerous assaults, I believe this agency has held the line in protecting wetlands,” Reilly said in announcing the wetlands policy.

The controversy has been particularly heated in the West, where farmers and home builders have sought to remove many kinds of wetlands from regulation. More than half the nation’s wetlands already have vanished, including 90% of those once found in California.

“It’s a pretty significant step,” said the EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It sends a very strong signal that what Mr. Quayle tried to do was a mess.”

Conservatives have complained vigorously that previous wetland regulations too severely restricted what private landowners could do with their property, forcing them to obtain a permit or halt development on land that was wet for only a short time during the year.

But a subsequent 1991 proposal favored by Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness infuriated environmental groups. EPA officials said it would have gutted protection for 50% of California’s wetlands, including 75% of seasonal wetlands around San Francisco Bay, nearly all of the Central Valley’s wetlands and mountain meadows and 10% of its tidal wetlands.

The regulations to be used by the EPA were described by officials as a compromise between a more restrictive set of rules approved in 1989 and the substantially looser requirements favored by home builders and some farm groups.

“It’s a victory for the environment,” said Sami Yassi, a staff scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Robert Szabo, a Washington attorney who represented some American Indian tribes, port authorities, oil companies, utilities and others in the wetlands battle, said Reilly probably took the best option available.

“But people are anticipating there will still be some problems” in identifying wetlands, he said.

Wetlands are important for wildlife, flood control and protecting the purity of surface water. But a national revolt erupted, particularly in the West, over the 1989 regulations that were intended to help Bush keep his 1988 election promise to halt the loss of wetlands.

Some critics of the 1989 rules said that half the state of Vermont, 40% of Maryland’s eastern shore and much of suburban Houston would have been considered wetlands and regulated under the rules.

Reilly, describing himself at the time as “very embarrassed,” proposed revisions to scale back the acreage that was considered wetlands but still protect places of key environmental concern.

Conservatives sought a massive reduction in what could be considered wetlands, resulting in the 1991 plan favored by Quayle’s staff. Federal government scientists said that the proposal would have eliminated the majority of wetlands in the West from regulation.

As Administration officials feuded, the Army Corps of Engineers, which issues wetlands permits, used a 1987 wetlands manual and the EPA, which has responsibility for helping identifying wetlands, used the more restrictive 1989 rules.

Now both agencies will use the 1987 rules, which are more flexible than the 1989 version but more restrictive than the Quayle-backed 1991 package.

The National Academy of Sciences is studying wetlands policy and is expected to make recommendations to the federal government on how to protect them within a year to 18 months, giving President-elect Clinton’s team an opportunity to change the rules further.