SMALL ANTS, TALL TALES

By NINA BURLEIGH/WASHINGTON

They used to be small businessmen, griping in obscurity about government red tape. But now they're big-time Congressmen whose real-life horror stories are making a big impression on Capitol Hill. House majority whip Tom DeLay, a former exterminator, says the Environmental Protection Agency has allowed fire ants to trample the South. Georgia dentist Charles Norwood says federal regulators have made it hard for children to believe in the tooth fairy. And Cass Ballenger, a North Carolina plastic-packaging manufacturer, says labyrinthine EPA rules have cost his business more than $1 million. Now, in the name of regulatory reform, DeLay, Norwood and Ballenger are attempting to de-fang and defund their old bureaucratic nemeses. Yet a closer look at their tales reveals that in terms of accuracy, they are more suited to the campfire than Congress.

Many people in business have valid stories of the burdens of regulations gone awry. But this year the Republican majority has filled the Capitol with stories of absurd excesses, many of them apocryphal. According to one bogus story, the Federal Government requires buckets to leak so children won't drown in them. Another says sand has been ruled a toxic substance. Nevertheless, myth and personal anecdote are powerful weapons.

"Fire ants are taking over the entire South," says DeLay, who until last year was the owner of Albo Pest Control in Houston. DeLay studied biology in college and went to work at a pesticide-formulation company in the early 1970s. There he learned that the EPA was banning Mirex, a pesticide that kills fire ants, aggressive interlopers from South America with a painful bite. DeLay, who believes Mirex is harmless, says this was his first exposure to the EPA's blundering ways. He claims that the delicensing of Mirex and another pesticide, chlordane, severely affected his extermination business, costing him more to do less.

While fire ants have spread northward, the EPA doesn't think the problem is serious enough to outweigh the potential dangers of the pesticides to humans. According to the EPA, studies done in the 1970s indicated that Mirex was present in human mothers' milk all over the South. The agency says Mirex and chlordane are both dangerous to human health. "We call Mirex a possible human carcinogen. Mr. DeLay might disagree with that, but we believe the studies," says Sylvia Lowrance, an EPA spokeswoman. Other nonpartisan groups, including the Inter national Agency for Research on Cancer, agree . Both pesticides are banned in some European and South American countries.

Ever prepared to criticize the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Georgia Republican Norwood carries around a page of snappy "OSHA soundbites" in his briefcase. He says OSHA regulations regarding disposal of bloody medical waste prohibited him from giving children their extracted baby teeth for the tooth fairy. "Now I don't mean that the OSHA idiots said dentists may not give out baby teeth," Norwood says. "They said any item with blood on it is contaminated. Lawyers look at that and read it strictly, and it was the opinion of the American Dental Association that we can't give out baby teeth." The A.D.A. denies it ever issued such an interpretation, but Norwood believes its interpretation of the osha rule would have included children's teeth. In any case, the A.D.A. says dentists continue to give kids their teeth.

Ballenger, chairman of a House subcommittee on workplace protections, fumes over the amount of money the EPA has cost him as the owner of a plastic-packaging company based in Hickory, North Carolina. The EPA regulates his factory because one of its by-products is methyl alcohol, which can contribute to ozone pollution. To control methyl alcohol releases, Ballenger had to build a catalytic converter for $600,000 and spend $500,000 to make airtight the room where he prints labels on the packaging. Running the pollution-control devices cost him $180,000 a year. After all that, he says, when he got a seventh printing press,the EPA told him to shut it down. He says he must now build a new plant 60 miles away , to which he will move two presses.

Keith Overcash, the North Carolina EPA regional director in charge of regulating Ballenger's plant, says the plant managers and EPA were in constant contact over the past 10 years and relations were always cooperative. According to Overcash, Ballenger himself never attended the meetings. Overcash says the EPA never told Ballenger to shut down his new press, and speculated that the company may be splitting up its operation simply to get below pollution limits and turn off the pollution-control devices. Ballenger concedes that he hopes to be able to shut down the costly devices. Meanwhile, he has voted with his Republican colleagues to cut the EPA's enforcement budget substantially.

The Senate's deregulation bill has so far been stalled. But the House isn't resting. It continues to send up appropriations bills piled with proposals to cut enforcement budgets. The House's deregulators are busy on several other fronts as well. They have rescinded a law that required firms to provide communities with information about the release of toxic substances. The House has also approved specific rule relaxations that will affect grocery stores, auto dealers, truckers and the United Parcel Service. Revenge is hard work--but sweet.