
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 17, 1995                   TAG: 9505170092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

CLEAN WATER ACT REVAMPED BY CONGRESS

The nation's most powerful water protection law emerged from a week's worth of congressional surgery Tuesday, looking leaner, according to crusaders against big government, and meaner, according to environmentalists.

And though the conservatives who led the cutting and restitching of the Clean Water Act pronounced their operation a success, it appeared unlikely that this new version would live long enough to become law.

The 319-page Clean Water Act Amendments of 1995, which passed the House on a 240-185 vote, would make a series of sweeping changes to existing law, including:

A new definition of wetlands that scientists said would strip federal protection from roughly half the nation's soggy places, hampering efforts to clean up the Everglades, the Chesapeake Bay, the Great Lakes and other waterways.

Revisions to the regulations governing cities' water- and sewage-treatment programs that would loosen standards for some pollutants and allow ocean dumping of lightly treated sewage.

A slowdown in efforts to halt the flow of polluted runoff from streets, parking lots and farm fields into the nation's waterways. The bill would give most cities until 2010 to come up with a plan for reducing storm-water runoff, which most experts say is one of the biggest sources of unchecked pollution.

A pollution trading program that would allow industries to dump more water pollutants if they produced less air pollution, or if other industries in the same area reduced their water pollutants.

Pennsylvania Republican Bud Shuster, who engineered the bill's passage, called it ``a historic environmental bill, a sound environmental bill, a balanced environmental bill.''

But House Minority Whip David Bonior, D-Mich., called it ``the ultimate example of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,'' saying the bill had been written by industry lobbyists for their benefit, not that of the public.

And liberal Republican Sherwood Boehlert of New York, the leading opponent of the bill in Tuesday's debate, predicted the changes it contains would never come to pass.

``Clearly this bill is not going to become law,'' Boehlert said in an interview as the final votes were being cast, pointing out that the bill's backers did not get the two-thirds' majority they would need to override a presidential veto.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, voted for the bill. Reps. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, and L.F. Payne, D-Nelson County, opposed it.

by CNB