House Approves Bill to Give Landowners Relief : Regulations: People would be paid if environmental laws hurt property values. Plan faces uncertainty in Senate.

The House, completing work on a sweeping revision of the government’s power to regulate, on Friday adopted a bill requiring compensation for many private landowners whose property values have been eroded by decisions made in Washington.

Joined by more than a third of House Democrats, Republicans won passage of another key part of their “contract with America” campaign manifesto, which called for Congress to “roll back government regulations” and ease federally imposed burdens on states, businesses and individuals.

“We’ve just given every household in America a $6,000 tax cut,” declared Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. That figure, Cox said, represents the cost to each American household of federal regulations. The effect of the new legislation would be to halt many regulations at their inception, he said.

The measure now goes to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain. Support for such action is not as broad in that chamber.

The so-called takings bill, shepherded through the House by freshman Rep. David M. McIntosh (R-Ind.), would place new limits on how the federal government interprets and enforces a wide range of laws designed to protect the environment.

It would force federal environmental agencies to compensate landowners whose property has been devalued by more than 20% as a consequence of those agencies’ actions and require the government to offer to buy a parcel of land if it loses more than half of its value on account of certain environmental laws and regulations.

The compensation would be required in all cases in which the government is carrying out the requirements of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act’s wetlands protection measures and all federal farm bills, as well as a number of federal water-rights bills.

In an action immediately following the passage of the measure, the House pulled together a handful of other regulatory reform bills approved earlier and voted to approve the separate measures as a single bill. The resulting bill, labeled the “Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act,” won passage on a 277-141 vote.

Collectively, the package would have a profound effect on a wide range of policies beyond the environment, including consumer rights and public health and safety. It includes a measure requiring federal agencies to conduct detailed analyses of the costs and benefits of all proposed regulations and a measure that would allow small businesses to sue the federal government over regulations they consider unduly burdensome. Also included is a bill placing a moratorium on all pending regulations until new strictures are in place.

Environmental groups warned that the takings bill adopted Friday either would cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year or would force the federal government to effectively stop enforcing key environmental laws. They charged that the Republicans’ regulatory rewrite would gut a generation of laws that have cleaned American rivers, improved the nation’s air and protected workers and consumers.

“This takings bill says, ‘If I can’t do exactly what I want with my property, no matter who I hurt, the taxpayers have to pay me,’ ” said Pam Goddard of the Sierra Club. “It’s very disingenuous. Proponents of the bill are trying to abolish all of these environmental laws but they’re not going to take them on forthrightly, because they know that won’t fly with the American public.”

*

At the same time, many noted that the House regulatory reform measures will face tougher challenges in the Senate where Democrats may not be as cooperative. In the House, substantial minorities of Democrats voted with Republicans on every measure this week. Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.), the chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, on Wednesday called the omnibus bill passed Friday “a prescription for gridlock and a regulatory straitjacket” and has predicted that the Senate would scale back “some of the more drastic regulatory measures” adopted by the House.

“We hope (the Senate) will not weaken” the House-passed measures, House Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas said at a news conference Friday. “This is a strong anti-regulation package.”

The bills approved this week providing citizens compensation for “takings” and requiring cost-benefit analyses are part of a group of initiatives that environmentalists have dubbed “the unholy trinity.” The third of those initiatives is a measure that largely would bar Congress from passing mandates on to state and local governments without approving funds to implement them. That bill was passed by the House in January and is awaiting action in the Senate.

Proponents of a crackdown on regulation have cited thousands of cases in which federal rules interfere with citizens and businesses and prove “needless, job-killing and just plain stupid.”

But environmentalists warned that the private-property bill would spark speculative buying of land and prompt a torrent of lawsuits in which businesses and speculators, as well as ordinary citizens, would claim that the federal government owes them money.

During the bill’s drafting and in more than two days of debate, House members rejected amendments that would have set higher thresholds for property devaluation requiring compensation, and which would have placed limits on compensation paid to speculators who purchase regulated land in hopes of reaping a windfall from taxpayers.

The Congressional Budget Office last year estimated that requiring compensation for landowners whose property values are hurt by just one program alone--a wetlands protection program--would cost the federal government between $10 billion and $45 billion a year. Providing compensation for the Endangered Species Act, which has prevented development on millions of acres of land that is habitat for rare plants and animals, likely would increase those costs considerably.

Democrats also said that the cost-benefit requirement included in the legislation would add $250 million a year to the government’s cost of implementing federal laws. The EPA has said that it may have to hire 1,000 more people to deal with the new risk reviews and cost-benefit studies.

Vote on Property Rights

Here is how members of the California delegation voted on a bill requiring federal agencies to compensate landowners for restrictions that protect wetlands and endangered species.

Republicans for--Baker, Bilbray, Bono, Calvert, Cox, Cunningham, Doolittle, Dreier, Gallegly, Herger, Horn, Hunter, Kim, Lewis, McKeon, Moorhead, Packard, Pombo, Radanovich, Riggs, Rohrabacher, Royce, Seastrand, Thomas

Democrats for--Condit, Dooley, Fazio, Harman, Lantos, Martinez

Republicans against--none

Democrats against--Becerra, Beilenson, Berman, Dellums, Dixon, Eshoo, Farr, Filner, Lofgren, Matsui, Miller, Mineta, Pelosi, Roybal-Allard, Stark, Torres, Tucker, Waters, Waxman, Woolsey.

Republicans not voting--Dornan

Democrats not voting--Brown