Environmentalists See Safe Water Act as Clinton Test : Legislation: Activists say the President’s actions on the measure will determine their future relationship.

The Safe Drinking Water Act--an arcane environmental law trickling through the legislative process on Capitol Hill--would not seem the sort of measure that could color a President’s political future.

And yet, with Congress slated to begin debate on the bill next week, the nation’s principal environmental organizations are making the water act the bellwether of their future relations with President Clinton.

If in the coming weeks the President joins their fight to protect water quality standards from compromises sought by many states and local water management agencies, environmentalists say that their relations with the Administration--which got off to a rocky start--will be amicable.

They reason that, after retreating in the face of opposition on so many of their cherished initiatives, Clinton will have drawn a line in the sand by taking a stand for the bill. A tough White House posture would scare opponents, rally environmentalists and set a new tone for a welter of environmental legislation to follow.

But if, in their eyes, the President ducks the fight and allows Congress to lower drinking water standards, environmentalists say the future of relations may be irreparably harmed. And that, in turn, could prompt the nation’s green groups to sit out Clinton’s reelection campaign, as well as a few races that are seen as important to his fate--like California’s gubernatorial race.

How did it come to this?

It is a measure of the current ferment in relations between the Clinton Administration and the environmental community that the reauthorization of an obscure law like the Safe Drinking Water Act has become a potential turning point for the nation’s environmentalists.

With nearly a dozen major pieces of environmental legislation on the congressional docket, green groups are reassessing the state of their relations with the Administration, as well as the political strategies they have pursued since Clinton entered the Oval Office promising a new era in environmental policy.

“There’s a lot of disappointment on both sides, because neither side has done what it really should have done,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the 500,000-member Sierra Club. “We environmentalists have not been on the agenda: We kind of assumed there was a basic level of support--which there wasn’t--and that the Administration was in the driver’s seat with regard to Congress--which it’s not.

“And we were naive,” added Pope in an admission increasingly heard from environmentalists. “We didn’t go out to the hustings to organize political support and pressure for our agenda. Many organizations still think you can go to Washington and get it all done. And you can’t.”

After 12 years of Republican administrations, when environmentalists found the White House door virtually closed to them, the first year of the Clinton Administration brought them access to the President and personnel appointments that surpassed their fondest hopes.

And yet, said Jim Maddy, executive director of the League of Conservation Voters, there is a “broadly felt sense” among the green groups that the Clinton Administration’s rhetorical embrace of their causes has not translated into clear policy victories.

“It’s a whole lot better than nothing,” said Maddy of the Administration’s first-year environmental efforts. But, he groused, “it wasn’t a good start.”

That year began when Clinton, facing a storm of Senate opposition, withdrew a proposal to raise fees charged to ranchers for grazing their livestock on federal lands--a hike that had been hailed by the green groups.

That pattern continued when Clinton backed down on imposing a broad-gauged energy tax sought by environmentalists after congressional critics balked.

On issues as varied as pesticide reform, greenhouse gas reduction and a plan to clean up the Everglades, environmentalists lament that the Administration has reached for politically expedient compromises that pose risks to the environment and public health.

Frustration over the Administration’s record led Maddy’s group in early February to issue Clinton an environmental report card with a decidedly lackluster grade of C-plus.

Clinton was stung by the mark, according to several senior Administration officials.

“It hurt,” said one frustrated aide in a leading environmental slot. “It hurt everybody” inside and out of the Administration, the official added.

In the Administration’s defense, officials pointed to the environmental stature of its appointees, the ambition of Clinton’s agenda and the access and consideration accorded to green groups in Administration deliberations. But they also complained of the environmentalists’ “overly optimistic view of what could be accomplished” and the depth of opposition many of the measures have encountered on Capitol Hill.

The coming months, Pope said, will be crucial in shaping the Administration’s long-term relationship with environmentalists. “I do not believe that the disappointment has yet moved to alienation,” Pope said. “It could, if it doesn’t get better in the next six months.”

It is no coincidence that the next six months also will be a pivotal time for an array of environmental initiatives in which the Administration will play a key role. The Safe Drinking Water Act is only one of almost a dozen bills making their tortuous way through Congress.

That act would lay out new standards for the purity of tap water--an environmental and public health issue on which green groups see the potential for a groundswell of popular support. Citing the expense of screening for many of the water-contaminants now regulated by the federal government, local water-management agencies and the National Governors’ Assn. are arguing for a relaxation of some of the standards. At the same time, environmentalists are seeking tougher standards for certain contaminants that pose special dangers to children and pregnant women.

Draft House and Senate bills differ, and environmentalists fear that nothing short of a high-level intervention by the Administration will head off changes to the safe water act that they charge could cause public health risks.

Other pieces of legislation range from overhaul of the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program to mining reform and tougher regulation of agricultural chemicals.

Virtually all the initiatives face opposition from a loose coalition of well-funded and well-organized special interests determined to slow what they see as the relentless march of environmental regulation.

Among them are groups dedicated to upholding private-property rights, heading off unfunded federal mandates and protecting the financial stakes of industries that could face stricter regulation under the new laws.

The White House’s response, in the environmentalists’ view, has been consistent and disappointing.

Frequently citing the need to jump start a stalled political process, the White House has brokered one compromise after another with the opponents of its environmental initiatives. As they have done so, the environmentalists’ initial wave of almost giddy excitement has turned to disillusionment.

“Both Clinton and (Vice President Al) Gore have hired people in important positions who have the exact right instincts,” said Jane Perkins, president of Friends of the Earth. “The problem is that this Administration is driven by politics, not instincts. And politics is compromise. While we have a meeting of spirit and ideals, these initiatives are not playing out to produce measures that we can support.”

The resulting disappointment has prompted environmentalists to rethink their strategy of relying on Congress and the Administration to deliver the measures they hold so dear.

Instead, they are hoping to rebuild their political clout--not in Washington, where they have reaped modest results in recent months, but at the local level, where the environmental movement first gained its strength and momentum.

“We know now that we need a new path. We know our current strategy is not working--we’re not winning,” said Jon Roush, president of the Wilderness Society. “We’ve dropped the ball. We’ve forgotten about grass-roots. And we need to address that.”

Complained one Administration environmentalist who welcomes the new strategy: “The crowd . . . fighting this legislation is out in the hustings organizing acre-by-acre, while the environmentalists are jostling to get into pictures with Al Gore. There is no power in Washington unless you can deliver back home, and that’s what the environmental community needs to remember.”

Rep. George Miller, (D-Martinez), who has pressed the environmentalists to refocus their political efforts, said that the shift “will take muscle, organization, someone going to town halls and raising these issues to put them on the agenda back home.”

This will be an especially challenging time to pursue that strategy, since membership in environmental groups has been sliding for several years.

At the same time, opinion polls indicate that Americans’ sense of urgency about environmental issues has lessened.

By 1993, just over one-fifth of Americans surveyed in a poll conducted by the Roper Organization identified themselves as active environmentalists, down from 29% the year before. Americans’ demand for further regulation was down, the poll found. And in a 1993 Harris poll, the number of respondents saying this country should be doing more to protect the environment dropped from a high of 97% in 1988 to 82% in 1993.

The renewed grass-roots strategy, environmentalists said, is designed to achieve two related objectives: provide a counterweight to the growing political voice of groups seeking to slow and reverse environmental legislation and, more important, to convince the Administration and many lawmakers that environmentalists are a political force to be respected and feared, not just admired and stroked and invited to the White House.

If the grass-roots efforts can do that, environmental strategists said, then Clinton and Capitol Hill lawmakers will think twice before rolling over on initiatives important to the green groups. Conversely, if politicians fight for environmental causes, the grass-roots will come out and fight for them at election time. And if they do roll over, the grass-roots will withhold their contributions, their organizational help and their votes.

For all the threat that such a strategy implies, environmentalists within the Administration said they would welcome a political revival of the greens in the hustings.

Several officials said that in negotiations, grass-roots pressure would help strengthen the hand of an Administration that has been battered by opposition to so many of its environmental initiatives.

“We’re all for that,” said one Administration strategist of the environmentalists’ back-to-the-grass-roots strategy. “Clearly the other side is better organized out there right now” than are the environmentalists. Those opposing much of Clinton’s environmental reform “are well-funded and organized and they really let us know what they’re thinking. Having a grass-roots constituency telling Congress that those are bad ideas would really help.”

Added Perkins of Friends of the Earth: “There was this feeling that maybe we could ‘just let Al (Gore) do it.’ Well, there’s a growing realization that Al needs help.”