Whitman Weighs Pesticides Guidelines

With so many matters to weigh during her first weeks in office, however, Whitman has yet to make her priorities clear, let alone whether she considers the looming decision on the out-of-court settlement as her first big political test, as an environmental group contended Feb. 22, 2001.

The consent decree, agreed to the day before President Bush took office, was based on the demands of the Natural Resources Defense Council and its co-plaintiffs of environmentalists and farm workers.

"She's definitely looking at the issue, but we don't have any comment at this point," Dave Deegan, the EPA’s spokesman for pesticide and biotechnology issues, told the AP.

On Jan. 19, former President Clinton's last full day in the White House, his EPA administration agreed to the settlement in a federal court in San Francisco.

Industry groups, who were not consulted, called it an abuse of power and demanded that Whitman seek to withdraw from the consent decree.

Next month, the EPA will have to either defend the settlement in court or scrap it. In a telephone conference call with reporters Feb. 22, the resources council depicted the stakes in stark terms.

"Christie Todd Whitman has a chance to show her true environmental colors and to really demonstrate whether she is taking a position to protect children and infants' health, or whether she's going to side with protecting industry profits and back out of the settlement," said Erik Olson, the council's staff attorney.

The environmental coalition sued to push the EPA into adopting elements from a 1996 pesticide law because the agency had missed an Aug. 3, 1999, deadline to review the “worst'” pesticides, including those used in foods most eaten by children.

The agency also had not implemented a program to test whether pesticides harm the body's hormone system, the lawsuit contended.

The plaintiffs, who included the United Farm Workers of America, also challenged the EPA's failure to complete a review of almost 200 pesticides registered before 1984.

Under the settlement, the EPA during the next year and a half must determine whether certain insecticides and weed killers act together as cumulative poisons, according to the resources council.

Whitman had no public reaction Feb. 22 on the question, but she is reviewing the matter and presumably will respond to the court in March, Deegan said.

The resources council hopes to blunt any influence by interest groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, that sent a Feb. 12 letter to the EPA. "The consent decree in this case - and the process by which it was developed - represents a serious abuse of power," the groups' attorneys wrote.

"The settlement is a clear attempt by the outgoing Clinton political appointees to create a new regulatory program, impose it on the new administration and give their perceived allies the power to use the courts to enforce the newly created requirements," they wrote.