Bush Would Overhaul U.S. Environmental Laws

Opening a new policy front, Texas Gov. George W. Bush proposed Monday an overhaul of federal environmental laws to rely more on private business to clean up polluted industrial sites.

Delivering his most detailed remarks so far on the environment--a traditional preserve of Democrats and an area of particular concern to Vice President Al Gore--Bush said that states, working with business, should have a freer hand in policing the health of their local communities. The key, he said, is increased flexibility--including lower standards in some cases--and fewer mandates coming from the federal government.

“The command-and-control structure out of Washington, D.C., won’t work,” said Bush, speaking at a U.S. Gypsum plant being built on the site of a former steel mill outside Pittsburgh. “The idea of suing our way or regulating our way to clean air and clean water is not effective public policy.”

Gore and his supporters in the environmental community were quick to denounce the Texas governor and blame his more free-market philosophy for the state’s widespread pollution problems.

“No amount of whitewashing can cover up his bad record on the environment,” said Doug Hattaway, a Gore spokesman. “On his watch, Texas has been the most polluted state in the country.”

Last summer, Houston supplanted Los Angeles as the nation’s smog capital. In addition, Texas ranks 46th among states for water-resources protection and 44th in per capita spending on environmental programs.

By taking on the environment, Bush may be attempting to refashion his image on a potentially nettlesome aspect of his record, in much the same way that Gore seized upon campaign-finance reform as a means of addressing ethical questions clouding his candidacy.

At the same time, Bush’s remarks Monday continued his recent efforts to flesh out his policy portfolio and move toward the political center by addressing issues more typically associated with Democrats. He delivered a series of education speeches last week; over the next several weeks, Bush plans to outline proposals dealing with health care, government reform and issues affecting senior citizens.

The plan Bush unveiled in this hard-pressed community focused on a single aspect of the environment: cleaning up so-called brownfields, which are former industrial sites that are often abandoned because of heavy pollution by their previous owners.

His package of proposals would seek to boost reclamation of these sites by exempting developers from liability for pollution problems they inherited, lessening cleanup requirements in some cases and making permanent a now-temporary tax incentive for businesses that agree to redevelop polluted sites. The cleanup requirements might be different, an aide explained, if a site is going to be used for industrial purposes rather than, say, for a school or housing.

Similar steps in Texas have resulted in restoration of 451 brownfields, Bush said, bringing $200 million in property onto the local tax rolls “and revitalizing communities across the state.” There are an estimated 450,000 brownfields nationwide; as many as 100,000 may be in California.

Many states, including California, already do what Bush is proposing by gearing cleanup of brownfields to their intended use. “It can be less expensive and in some cases it can be quicker,” said Barbara Coler of the California Environmental Protection Agency, who nevertheless expressed concern about lowering standards.

Bush contrasted the experience in Texas with results of the federal government’s troubled Superfund program which, he said, epitomizes “the old Washington, D.C., way of doing things.”

As of last June 30, according to the General Accounting Office, only about half of the country’s 1,231 Superfund sites had been cleaned, at a cost of billions more than anticipated. The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress.

“The old system of mandate, regulate and litigate only sends potential developers off in search of greener pastures--literally,” Bush said, suggesting that the failure to reclaim polluted sites has contributed to suburban sprawl and the impoverishment of abandoned neighborhoods.

In another of his proposals, Bush suggested that all federal facilities be required to comply with federal environmental laws, turning the government from a major polluter “into the good neighbor it should be.”

The Republican presidential hopeful delivered his address to an audience of about 200 hard-hatted workers hemmed into a tiny corner of the sprawling Gypsum plant, including a puckish few with “Gore 2000” stickers affixed to the back of their helmets.

The environment has been a particularly cherished cause for Gore, who wrote a 1992 bestseller offering his policy prescriptions and expressing alarm over such phenomena as global warming. Since then, Gore has played a lead role in guiding the Clinton administration’s environmental agenda, although some activists have found him less supportive than they had hoped.

Still, environmental activists hastened Monday to rally behind Gore and criticize his rival’s proposals, saying Bush lacks all credibility on the issue.

“What, in effect, he is proposing is to weaken the existing Superfund law to allow companies to do less cleanup, and that poses a potential threat to health and the environment,” said Daniel J. Weiss, political director of the Sierra Club.

But Bush insisted: “I’ve got a good record” on the environment. He said he would be pleased to contrast his performance with Gore’s “Our state . . . didn’t wait for Al Gore to wave his magic wand to clean up our environment,” Bush said. “We cleaned it up ourselves.”

It is the vice president, he insisted, who is “going to have a lot of explaining to do”--including some of the positions he outlined in “Earth in the Balance,” which some critics deemed extreme. Personally, Bush said, he has never read Gore’s book.

Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein and Massie Ritsch contributed to this story.