Proposed Clean Air Plan Breaks 10-Year Stalemate

WASHINGTON —  In a compromise hailed by the White House but sharply criticized by environmentalists, Bush Administration and Senate negotiators reached agreement Thursday on a sweeping package of regulations aimed at cleaning up the nation’s polluted air.

The bipartisan accord, the result of more than 250 hours of closed-door negotiations, breaks a decade-long deadlock in the struggle to enact new air pollution controls and paves the way for the first revision in 13 years of the 1970 Clean Air Act.

“This is a truly historic moment for the environment,” said William K. Reilly, director of the Environmental Protection Agency. “The long stalemate that has characterized the clean air debate over most of the past decade has been broken.”

President Bush, on a two-day swing through California to support Sen. Pete Wilson’s gubernatorial campaign, hailed the agreement as “a very big step forward” in protecting the environment without threatening the competitiveness of U.S. industry.

But leading environmental organizations, joined by Sens. Wilson, Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and other dissenting lawmakers, criticized the compromise as too weak to help California and other severely polluted states attain their clean air goals.

“This bill needs major surgery because it allows the Bush Administration to shirk its responsibilities to require polluted cities to clean up and because it leaves millions of Americans exposed to cancer-causing toxic chemicals,” said Daniel Weiss, a spokesman for the Sierra Club.

Cranston said the bill “does not go nearly far enough in reducing tailpipe pollution,” while Wilson, who led an unsuccessful attempt to strengthen the bill’s clean fuel provisions, called the compromise “irrelevant to California’s needs.”

But Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) defended the agreement, noting that it strengthens current law by tightening curbs on automobile emissions, encouraging the use of cleaner-burning fuels and imposing controls on acid rain and a broad range of toxic chemicals.

Mitchell, who agreed to the closed-door talks with the Administration after determining that the original bill did not have enough supporters to thwart a threatened filibuster, said he would introduce the new legislation on the Senate floor Monday.

Floor debate is expected to last from several days to several weeks. With a strong bipartisan coalition now supporting the agreement, however, passage of its key provisions appears virtually certain.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), leader of a coalition that for years had helped prevent clean air legislation from reaching the Senate floor, promised not to oppose the bill despite strong acid rain provisions that will have a negative effect on his state.

Wilson and two dissenting members of the Senate committee that drafted the original bill, Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), indicated they would offer amendments on the floor.

All three said they were upset with the weakened automobile provisions, which would impose a second round of tailpipe emission controls only if more than 11 out of 27 cities currently classified as seriously polluted do not meet federal clean air standards by the year 2000.

Under the bill, an initial round of controls, identical to those already approved for California, would go into effect nationwide between 1993-95. But the Administration had opposed the second round of even tougher controls as being too costly.