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An embarrassed White House moved to contain the image spill, launching its own probe of the EPA and proposing a compromise to try to settle the contempt case against Gorsuch. But it could do little to muffle the echoes of earlier Capital scandals: whining paper shredders, charges of lying under oath, mysterious erasures on subpoenaed documents, leaked memos and harassment of whistle blowers. Problems began for Lavelle soon after she assumed the $67,200-a-year EPA post ten months ago. Ambitious but short on administrative skills, "she came into the agency like a Mack truck," said one former EPA official. "She simply wasn't suited for a position at that level, and many people virtually ignored her." Her background was in the chemical industry, and she quickly developed a reputation among environmentalists and some EPA career employees for being too willing to accommodate companies that wanted to settle disputes quietly in her office and avoid more costly and publicly damaging penalties. Critics charged that she followed Gorsuch's lead in using budget cuts to reduce enforcement efforts.
Despite their seeming philosophical kinship, Gorsuch and Lavelle had a strained relationship. Friction between the two officials increased as Congress gave the Superfund closer scrutiny. According to colleagues, Gorsuch felt that Lavelle, who had worked for two years on Reagan's public relations staff when he was Governor of California, had been forced on her by the White House. Lavelle exacerbated matters by bragging about her ties with Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese. Although Meese says he knows her only slightly, Lavelle referred to him fondly as her "godfather."
Lavelle further weakened her position by feuding openly with Robert Perry, EPA's general counsel. Their first big clash came last spring, when Perry urged her to avoid a conflict of interest in the case of the Stringfellow Acid Pits dump near Riverside, Calif., a high-priority EPA target site where 32 million gal. of toxic wastes had been dumped during 17 years. Before joining EPA, Lavelle had worked for the California chemical company Aerojet-General Corp., where she developed a public relations campaign to counter pollution charges against the company. It was a job that kept her busy. In 1979 California accused the company of illegally dumping 20,000 gal. per day of poisonous waste; in 1981 the EPA branded Aerojet's liquid fuel plant in Rancho Cordova as one of the nation's worst dumps.
Senators at Lavelle's confirmation hearing were worried about her ties to Aerojet—one of more than 100 companies negotiating with the EPA over dumping in Stringfellow—and made her promise to stay out of cases involving the firm. Nevertheless, Lavelle did not formally disqualify herself from the Stringfellow case until June 18, and informally kept her hand in after that, according to agency insiders.