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While not so alarmist, Carol Browner, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is also concerned. The Republican legislation, she says, would "create a convoluted maze that could prevent us from doing our jobs" and would also have "a real impact on our ability to protect public health." Had the Contract with America been in place two decades ago, she maintains, federal regulators would not have been able to reduce the use of leaded gasoline, which everyone now agrees is a major health hazard.
Newt & Co. say they are simply trying to bring reason to federal regulation. They relish citing examples of overzealous enforcement-the sheep rancher who was fined $4,000 for shooting a grizzly bear that was attacking him, or the landowners who were sent to jail for building on "wetlands," a broad term that regulators have applied to property that contains standing water for as little as 11 days in a year.
But state and local officials, too, criticize Washington rulemakers. Enforcers of the Safe Drinking Water Act, for example, require towns like Rutland, Vermont (pop. 18,000), to test for 121 chemicals in the water. Complains Mayor Jeffrey Wennberg: "More than 80% of those chemicals would never be found in our water because there is no farming or industry here. It's ludicrous."
Westerners are outraged at the EPA's costly new one-size-fits-all vehicle-emission standards, which they say make no sense in sparsely populated areas. "It's not fair applying Eastern, urban standards to rural areas," complains John Kelly, a policy aide to Arizona Governor Fife Symington.
Yet the benefits of EPA strictures are often worth the cost. Key West, Florida, a tourists' lair with a permanent population of around 25,000, is a case in point. As late as 1987, the village pumped its raw sewage through leaking pipes less than a mile out to sea, where it was laying waste to the nearby reefs and fishing grounds. Outside town, a waste dump had grown into what locals called "Mount Trashmore."
It was then that the EPA mandated that the village lay new pipes, erect a sewage-treatment plant, close the dump and build an incinerator. While the EPA eventually footed $18 million of the initial $32 million expense of the treatment plant, the village was forced to raise utility bills to pay the rest, and the costs associated with the improvements continue to climb. That helped bring Key West's cost of living to the highest level in the state, forcing many "conches"-native Key Westers-to move away. Even so, John Jones, the village engineer, admits "it was something the city had to do" to save the tourist and fishing industries. "We had to clean up our act or we wouldn't have an act."
The EPA admits to being overzealous at times and points to corrective steps now in the works, such as changing the 11-day rule in the wetlands definition. But environmentalists contend that reform is not what's on Republicans' minds. Says Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope: "The agenda they have set is not to fix these laws but to weaken them."
The agenda's controversial triad: