Senate Votes Are Last of 104th Congress

A weary U.S. Senate resolved disputes over airport funding and national parks bills Thursday as it prepared to lower the curtain on the 104th Congress at last.

The Senate approved the airport bill, 92 to 2, after Democrats lost a last-ditch effort to strip out a provision opposed by organized labor. The parks bill, which provides for maintenance of the Presidio in San Francisco and other public lands around the country, cleared on a voice vote.

Both bills already had been approved by the House and are expected to be signed by President Clinton.

The long-awaited finale of the 104th Congress, the first in 40 years to be run by Republicans, is a case study in anticlimax. It began two years ago with bold GOP efforts to transform the nation’s governing ideology, moved on to adopt a bundle of major bills and ended with lawmakers squabbling over special-interest riders and scrambling to rescue scores of local projects for their constituents.

Senate leaders called Clinton on Thursday to tell him that the work of the 104th Congress was finished. “We’ve got some good news for you,” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) told Clinton.

“You guys did such a great job,” Clinton responded. “It’s amazing how much you’ve got done in the last few weeks. You should really be proud.”

Adjournment has seemed overdue because Congress cleared its last major piece of legislation days ago. By Monday both the House and Senate had passed an omnibus budget bill to keep the government operating for the next year.

But the Senate remained in session, hung up over the airport bill, which would provide $19 billion over two years for airport maintenance and improvements as well as beefed-up security programs, such as background checks for baggage handlers.

The bill also would require the National Transportation Safety Board to be the point of contact for families of passengers involved in a crash and prevent unlicensed pilots from flying in competitions or aeronautic feats. The latter provision was inserted after the death last spring of 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff as she tried to set a cross-country record for young pilots.

The provision in dispute essentially makes it harder for workers at Federal Express to join a union. The dispute may have served as a fitting end to a Congress that has been riven by partisanship because it allowed both parties to replay arguments that have been central to the ideological combat of the last two years.

Democrats charged that the provision showed Republicans were ready to ride roughshod over the interests of working people. The GOP said that Democrats’ opposition showed they were in the pocket of organized labor, which is spending millions of dollars this year to help defeat Republican candidates in this fall’s elections.

Under the provision, FedEx workers will be subject to the regulations of the Railway Labor Act, which requires many transportation workers to organize nationally, rather than the National Labor Relations Act, which allows most workers to organize in local bargaining units. It is generally easier to organize locally than nationally.

The issue was somewhat clouded by the nature of Federal Express, which uses both air and land transportation. Truckers typically are covered by the labor relations act, while air transport and railroad workers are subject to the railway act.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) led the unsuccessful fight to drop the contested provision. Even though the amendment was sponsored by a Democrat--Sen. Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina--Kennedy blamed the Republicans. “Everyone knows that Federal Express’ anti-worker amendment would not have passed a Democratically controlled House and Senate,” Kennedy said.

Hollings objected to Kennedy’s characterization of the bill as a “union-busting” measure. He said that it was simply a technical change designed to correct an error made in another law passed in late 1995.

The parks bill expands and improves parks in 41 states, and, among other things, sets up a trust to preserve the Presidio, a former military base in San Francisco that has been taken over by the National Park Service.

The bill also would create the nation’s protected tall-grass prairie in Kansas, would create a historic trail commemorating the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama, would allow an increase in the number of cruise ships visiting wildlife-rich Glacier Bay in Alaska and would approve a land exchange in Snowbasin, Utah, for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

The measure was a stripped-down version of a more ambitious bill that Clinton had threatened to veto over such provisions as one that would allow corporate sponsorship of national parks.

To avoid a veto, the House had eliminated that element and others opposed by the administration. But in the Senate, a similarly stripped-down bill was held up by Sen. Frank H. Murkowksi (R-Alaska), who threatened to stall it until the administration agreed to address a separate issue: the protection of about 500 jobs in the timber industry in southeastern Alaska.

Murkowski allowed the bill to go forward after White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta reached a side agreement under which the federal government is to provide timber from the Tongass National Forest for at least two years to mills operated in the region by the Ketchikan Paper Co.

Even though the side agreement freed the parks bill for approval, questions remain over whether the timber plan would be carried out. Environmentalists questioned whether the side agreement would be subject to environmental protection laws. Murkowski reportedly is seeking to reduce the environmental restrictions that would limit loggers’ access to the forests.

The debate over the future of the Tongass, a temperate rain forest, has grown particularly contentious, with many environmental groups fearing that a failure to further restrict logging there would put the entire forest at risk.

Charles Clusen, who has followed the issue closely for the Natural Resource Defense Council, reviewed the agreement and praised the administration for taking steps that he said would protect the forest.

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.