Senate Backs Looser Rules on Safe Water : Health: Lawmakers aim to balance fear of impurity against economic interests. Neither environmentalists nor their opponents on the issue are satisfied.

The Senate, trying to balance environmental concerns with economic interests, overwhelmingly approved legislation Thursday that would loosen some of the regulations governing the safety of the nation’s drinking water.

The move was largely in response to widespread criticism from water industry groups and state and local governments, which have complained that meeting the more stringent safety standards had become too costly.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the outcome demonstrated that economic growth and environmental safeguards were not incompatible.

“For years now, there has been in essence a religious war between the business community and the environmental community. . . . It seemed like you were either for the environment or for the economy. . . . This bill is a striking break from that pattern,” Baucus said.

But Baucus’ optimistic prediction that peace was at hand was not reflected in the reactions of either of the main combatants in the great economy-versus-the-environment debate.

Representatives of businesses and local governments, which had sought even greater relief from what they argued were unnecessary and costly federal regulations, were tepid in their support of the bill, endorsing the outcome but expressing concern that some of the regulatory relief could be reversed when the debate moves to the House, which has yet to consider the legislation.

Environmentalists, for their part, were outraged.

“The Senate’s action is a plague on the American public. . . . (It) plays roulette with the public’s health, allowing dangerous levels of contamination to strike any system at any time,” said Blake Early, director of environmental quality for the Sierra Club.

The change in the regulations came in a 95-3 vote in which the Senate reauthorized the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act.

A key provision in the revised bill would establish a $1-billion annual revolving loan fund for use by local governments to help pay for removing pollutants from the nation’s 200,000 public water systems.

Under the bill, the Environmental Protection Agency would be obliged to regulate fewer waterborne contaminants and to weigh the costs of removing them against the risks they pose to public health before developing new drinking water standards.

In addition, small water suppliers serving communities of fewer than 10,000 people would be exempt from some testing and technology requirements if they could not afford them.

Dr. Philip Landrigan, chairman of community medicine at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, said the changes “set a dangerous precedent” that could lead to less safe drinking water, “especially for infants and other vulnerable segments of the population.”

“Flexibility becomes a code word for doing less,” said Landrigan, who is a pediatrician and a member of the American Public Health Assn.

Although they hope to stop the bill in the House, the environmentalists’ anger reflected a deeper disappointment at losing what they saw as a bellwether vote on the Clinton Administration’s commitment to defending environmental causes.

“Clearly, environmental issues are not a priority for Clinton,” said Carolyn Hartmann, a lobbyist with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Environmentalists had high praise for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who pushed through two amendments that restored some of the safeguards in the bill.

One would require the EPA to take into account the potential health risks of contaminants in drinking water on “the most vulnerable segments of the population,” including children, the elderly and pregnant women. Boxer said more than 10 million Californians are included in those groups. The other would provide some special protections against lead contamination.

The dynamics of green politics have shifted so significantly during the past 18 months that many environmentalists say they are finding, to their dismay, that they have less clout in Congress now than they did when George Bush was in the White House and environmental issues provided a popular platform for Democrats looking to attack a Republican President.

With “Clinton and (Vice President Al) Gore in the White House, Democrats are not lining up to fight” the Administration as they used to, Hartmann said.

“We are deeply disappointed,” Early said, “because we had expected the Clinton Administration to show more leadership” on environmental issues.

Instead, as the environmentalists see it, the field has been left open to an anti-regulatory backlash pressed by Republicans and moderate-to-conservative Democrats for whom pruning government bureaucracy and cutting spending are more popular issues.

The drinking water controversy, for instance, was treated on the Senate floor more as a question involving unfunded federal mandates than as an environmental or public health issue.

But Baucus and other architects of the Senate bill denied that public health standards would be compromised and said the revisions were needed to rationalize regulations so cumbersome and complex that they often were not enforced anyway.

“Frankly, we overdid it the last time,” Baucus said. “We went too far and that’s why we’re here today, trying to make the system work. . . . The American people want us to take a practical, common-sense approach to our environmental problems, and that’s what this bill does.”