House Approves Overhaul of Clean Water Act

The House approved a sweeping rewrite of one of the country’s landmark environmental laws Tuesday, voting to weaken the federal government’s role in enforcing the nation’s water quality standards and in protecting wetlands.

The House voted, 240 to 185, to reauthorize the Clean Water Act of 1972, but only after making a host of controversial revisions--many of which seem unlikely to survive in the Senate.

Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), chairman of the House panel that drafted the bill, called it “a major environmental accomplishment” that would disarm the “radical environmental fringe” in the debate over controlling water pollution.

The Clinton Administration, environmental activists and their allies on Capitol Hill, however, have denounced the bill as a major concession to polluters and a rollback of existing law that would reverse the tide of improvement in the quality of the nation’s waterways.

“This bill is a victory for polluters and a serious defeat for clean water,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol M. Browner told The Times after the vote. “It will increase the flow of sewage and toxic waste into the nation’s waterways and provide more protection to polluters than to Americans who want safe water to drink, swim in and fish from. It’s truly an extreme rewrite and an outrageous rollback of 25 years of very hard work.”

Browner said she will urge President Clinton to veto the bill in its present form, which Clinton has said he would do.

But that is a threat on which Clinton is unlikely to have to make good because the more moderate Senate is not expected to accept some of the House bill’s more controversial provisions.

The measure would have a profound effect in California, where wetlands and coastal-zone regulations have played a critical role in land-use decisions and have led to intense clashes between powerful environmental and development constituencies.

Only 9% of the state’s original 5 million acres of wetlands remain, a greater percentage loss than any other state. Farmers and developers are eager to put much of the remaining wetlands to use. In addition, provisions relaxing rules governing the dumping of sewage into the ocean would affect many of California’s coastal cities, including Los Angeles and San Diego.

In the end, 34 Republicans defected and voted against the bill, while 45 Democrats crossed party lines to support it. The resulting 55-vote margin falls well short of what it would take to override a presidential veto. But Shuster said he was delighted with the vote and pleased that so many Democrats had joined majority Republicans in approving the bill.

Most Democrats who backed the bill were drawn to its provisions governing wetlands protection, as well as to its efforts to ensure federal compensation to landowners whose property values are eroded because of wetlands protection.

The bill would make broad changes in the process by which federal agencies identify and place limits on the development of wetlands, a revision sought by farmers and developers and fiercely opposed by environmental advocates.

The measure would bypass the EPA, which currently plays a central role in wetlands policy, to consolidate responsibility for defining wetlands with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Agriculture, two agencies whose primary mission is farming and development.

Critics of the new system charged that it would free for development as much as 70% of wetlands currently protected by the government. That, they added, would contribute to a general decline in water quality nationwide because wetlands have been shown to play a critical role in filtering impurities from water as well as to help mitigate floods and provide habitat for migrating birds.

But Shuster on Tuesday said the bill would fix what has become a nightmare for all involved in the system of wetlands protection. “Wetlands will not have bureaucrats practicing Gestapo-like tactics on the American people,” he said following the vote.

The bill would require that in cases where federal wetlands restrictions devalue property by more than 20%, the government would be required to compensate the landowner. That provision alone, critics said, could cost taxpayers $15 billion.

The measure also would make it easier for coastal cities, under certain circumstances, to release lightly treated sewage into the ocean. The EPA has estimated that some 80 coastal cities would take advantage of the relaxed restrictions and warned that increased beach closures would likely result.

The bill also specifically exempts San Diego from a current requirement to provide extra treatment for sewage that it plans to pipe into the Pacific at a point 4 1/2 miles off Point Loma.

The bill was favored by, and according to critics, largely written by industries that dispose of waste water in rivers, streams and lakes. In many cases, it would relax requirements for industries to treat their discharged waters for some 70 pollutants. It would also make adherence to a federal plan to reduce pollution of the Great Lakes largely voluntary.

In several days of debate and voting, the House did pass one substantial amendment to the original draft of the bill, over Shuster’s objection.

An earlier draft would have ended a requirement that coastal states submit plans for the reduction of water pollution from hard-to-pinpoint sources such as farms and city streets. But lawmakers restored the requirement and left the EPA administrator with a major role in approving such plans.

The water bill is the first of a series of GOP-drafted environmental measures to reach the House floor and many on both sides of the debate said it provides an indicator of how future environmental bills will fare.

“This tells us the American people spoke on Nov. 8,” Shuster said. “And Congress is reflecting those views. They want some common sense and balance in environmental policy. . . . We don’t want the radical environmental fringe running our environmental policy.” Shuster said that fringe includes those running the Administration’s land-use and anti-pollution efforts.