Clearing the Air at EPA

Ruckelshaus faces hard choices on the environment

It was a tawdry reprise of an old scandal. In a Washington courtroom where former Environmental Protection Agency Official Rita Lavelle stood trial for perjury last week, the familiar charges of conflict of interest and political manipulation flew once again. Former aides told how Lavelle had wept while they hastily removed whole briefcases of sensitive documents. Yet for all the melodrama, the accusations seemed almost irrelevant, an old story relegated to the back pages. Since the scandal climaxed last spring with the firing or resignation of the EPA's top echelon, the agency has been seemingly transformed into a model of probity.

The turnaround is in large part the work of the EPA's new administrator, William Ruckelshaus. Highly respected as the EPA'S first head (1970-73), Ruckelshaus was recalled from private life in May to salvage what is now the Government's largest regulatory agency. He has replaced numerous political second-raters and former industry lobbyists hired by his predecessor, Anne Burford, with experienced Government operators. He has restored morale among EPA employees and pleased the White House by getting the agency off the nightly news. Says William Drayton, a top EPA official in the Carter Administration, who formed the Save EPA Working Group to counter the Reagan Administration's attacks on the agency: "Bill Ruckelshaus has given EPA back its sense of self-respect."

In sharp contrast to the closed-door management style of his predecessor, Burford, Ruckelshaus announced that he would operate the EPA in a "fishbowl." He has done so, right down to making public his daily appointment book. Known for his integrity (he resigned as Nixon's Deputy Attorney General in 1973 rather than fire the Watergate special prosecutor), Ruckelshaus, 51, is a veteran of Government hotspots, including a stint as acting director of the FBI in 1973. Easygoing and open, he consults widely within the agency before making decisions, walking through the departments and sharing brown-bag lunches with lower-level employees. Says one: "He can be a Boy Scout but also one of the boys."

Ruckelshaus has not changed EPA policy completely, but incrementally and without fanfare. Among his most significant actions:

> He reversed the EPA's policy on paying to clean up toxic-waste sites out of the $1.6 billion superfund that Congress appropriated for that purpose. Under Lavelle, the Government dickered endlessly with industry over who would bear the cost. Meanwhile, the dumps festered. Ruckelshaus' policy is "Clean now, worry about who pays later."

> He abandoned a Burford proposal to make it easier for states to raise allowable pollution levels in lakes and streams.

> He has defended the Clean Water Act as "fundamentally a sound piece of legislation." His predecessors had proposed so many changes in the law that environmentalists called their version a "dirty-water bill."

To environmental groups, predictably, these steps are not enough. The Administration, they claim, is still not committed to cleaning up the environment. Ruckelshaus is suspect, since he represented industry in environmental cases as a private lawyer after he left Government in 1973. The Sierra Club, the nation's most activist environmental group, gives him only a "gentleman's C."

He deserves higher marks, at least for effort. On the controversial question of acid rain, Ruckelshaus has prepared the

Administration's first proposals for a modest control program. His plan would cut sulfur emissions from factories by more than 3 million tons a year. That is less than proposals in Congress calling for reductions of 8 million tons. But it was too much for the deregulators at the Office of Management and Budget, who have been trying to save money by cutting red tape. OMB Chief David Stockman scoffs that it would cost "$6,000 per Ib. offish."

Ruckelshaus does not share the environmentalists' zeal for big government programs. He sees his role as one of educating the public about the hard choices involved in cleaning up the environment. In a much publicized action in Tacoma, he is asking local residents to help the EPA decide on the acceptable level of arsenic emissions from a copper smelter that, if closed down, would cost the community 575 jobs. Ruckelshaus wants people to know that scientific information is often imprecise, especially about lethal toxic chemicals that the agency is only beginning to deal with. The public hearings are not a "rationalization for inaction," he insists. Rather, he wants the public to "share with me the vexing nature of environmental decisions." Noted Ruckelshaus in his office last week: "Even if all of the people do not agree with the final decision, at least they will understand we did the best we could. And gaining public acceptance of our decisions is very important." Indeed, that is what the EPA needs most of all. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.