EPA Vote Switch Yanks Dooley Out of Obscurity : Politics: Democrat at first lined up with environmentalists, then sided with GOP after lobbying from his district about the impact.

When it came to a House vote last Friday on curbing the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency, California Rep. Calvin Dooley lined up with the environmentalists and helped hand them a stunning victory. By Friday night, his phone was ringing. By Monday morning, he had changed his mind.

When it was all over, the Republicans had reversed a humiliating defeat. And Dooley--the only Democrat to defect to the GOP side--was the deciding vote, a Visalia alfalfa farmer so inconspicuous that a Capitol Hill newspaper has twice given him an honorable mention on its “Obscure Caucus.”

“He made a name for himself,” chortled one Republican congressional aide. “Whether he wanted to or not.”

A fourth-generation farmer born in the Central Valley district he represents, Dooley is a conservative Democrat and no stranger to voting the Republican agenda. He sided with as much as 70% of the “contract with America,” voted for a balanced budget amendment and opposed burning the U.S. flag.

He is a deficit-hawk who wins kudos from local chambers of commerce for his pro-business stance. His heart is with the local farm industry that in Fresno County produces nearly $3 billion annually in agricultural output, the biggest in the nation.

Still, Dooley prides himself on his sensitivity to the plight of the poor in a decidedly Latino district rife with struggling migrant workers and hounded by unemployment, crime, teen pregnancy and disease rates that far outstrip statewide averages. A social moderate, he supports abortion rights and gun control.

The “Obscure Caucus” to which the newspaper Roll Call has almost named him twice (he fell short only because he had not yet served three terms) lauds legislators who pay strict attention to their districts and avoid the media limelight--”workhorses, not show horses,” as the newspaper puts it.

That’s Calvin Dooley, a lanky home-grown lawmaker who farms everything from walnuts to alfalfa to cotton, just as his great-grandfather did. He likes to say he has “come a long way from driving a tractor in Goshen,” earning a master’s degree in agribusiness from Stanford University. But he has hardly forgotten his roots, which helps explain why he switched his vote to save Fresno and the town of Hanford the expense of EPA orders to remove arsenic and radon from their drinking water.

Just elected to a third term by a comfortable margin, Dooley comes from a district where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1, where voters care little about Washington politics and lots about local issues. Indeed, community environmentalists seemed unaware of Dooley’s big switch, and the Visalia Times-Delta did not cover it.

“We’re pretty, well, backwater isn’t the right term,” Brian Newton, past president of the Tulare County Audubon Society, said when asked to characterize the community concern over arsenic in the drinking water, one of the EPA regulations under attack. “The people who are environmentally friendly are very upset by it and would like to change it, but we are overwhelmed by everybody else around here.”

The issue that made a splash in Washington and hardly a ripple in Visalia was a House vote Friday night. It was a 212-to-206 vote against an effort to severely limit the EPA’s authority to enforce major anti-pollution regulations. The vote, made possible by 51 GOP defectors, was a headline-winning coup for a Democratic Party getting pummeled by the new majority.

But the Republicans turned the tables three days later when they called for a new vote and came up with a 210-210 tie, one short of the majority needed to rescue the EPA. And it was Dooley who switched his vote and made the difference.

Now environmentalists are steamed--at the Republicans who maneuvered to get a second vote on the measure in the first place, at the handful of environmental Democrats who failed to show up for the second ballot, and at Dooley, whose district-minded decision was a shot heard ‘round the country.

“He did radical surgery for a problem specific to his district. He took the EPA out of the game for the entire country. That’s frightening,” said Robert Sulnick, executive director of the American Oceans Campaign in Santa Monica.

Dooley said he changed his mind after public water agency advocates told him the EPA requirements to remove arsenic and radon from drinking water would cost Fresno $197 million and Hanford--population 45,000--$30 million.

“With the fiscal condition of those communities, that led me to change my mind,” Dooley said in an interview, arguing that the EPA had yet to establish that the risk justifies the cost. “No one likes to change a vote, but when you are presented with information that is very compelling and if you are doing the job and you are convinced, you should change your position. That’s what I did.”

Environmentalists believe he did more than that. Dooley not only addressed a problem in his district, they charge, he prevented the EPA from enforcing technology-based standards for water quality, wetlands protection and clean air requirements on oil refineries for the nation.

Furthermore, activists said, the $197 million Fresno says it would cost to remove radon from its drinking water is more than it would cost to do the job for the whole country. Arsenic, they said, is known to trigger skin cancer and diabetes, and if the Central Valley had a problem affording removal, Dooley should have sought a waiver from the regulation.

“He threw the baby out with the bathwater,” Sulnick said. “It’s a dark age when we have all this science in place that unequivocally tells us what to do and we ignore it. His one vote changed things for the whole nation.”

Dooley’s change of heart won high praise from the California Assn. of Water Agencies in Washington, the folks who made one of the persuasive phone calls to the congressman’s office Friday night.

“He really did an outstanding job for his district. He took the initiative to look beyond the rhetoric and do the responsible thing by solving a very serious problem in his district,” said David Reynolds, the agencies’ director of federal relations.

Nevertheless, Dooley is not exactly comfortable with his vote. He believes attaching a bunch of riders to a major spending bill is not the way to legislate environmental policy--the reason he voted with the EPA in the first place.

“But I wasn’t comfortable with a yes or a no,” the congressman said. “This was an issue where there wasn’t a good choice. Hopefully, as it is considered in conference committee, more work will be done and the rough edges will be sanded down so we have a more responsible piece of legislation.”

He hardly considers himself responsible for a whopping Democratic defeat, however. “There were 209 other members who voted the way I did,” he noted.

Not to mention a dozen or so Democrats criticized for not voting at all that fateful Monday night--a margin that would have made Dooley’s vote insignificant. Among them: Rep. Pete Stark of Hayward, who was said to be attending a Lamaze class with his pregnant wife; Rep. Xavier Becerra of Los Angeles, at home tending a sick infant, and Rep. Walter R. Tucker of Compton, said to have been delayed on a late plane.