Bush Vows To Reduce Arsenic in H2O
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer
March 29, 2001

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said Thursday he will pursue some reductionin the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water, but not before morescientific studies on where the level should be set.

Bush defended his decision to withdraw new arsenic regulations issuedby President Clinton in the final days of his administration.

"We pulled back his decision so that we can make a decision basedon sound science," said Bush. He promised that after the science review"there will be a reduction in arsenic" in drinking water.

The current standards, set in 1942, allow a maximum of 50 parts per billionarsenic in drinking water. Clinton's Environmental Protection Agency directedthe standards be lowered to 10 parts per billion.

The decision, although announced three days before Clinton left office,had been in the works for several years, prompted in part by a lawsuit byenvironmentalists.

On Wednesday, two senior House Democrats questioned the legality of Bush'saction. In a letter to EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, Reps. John Dingellof Michigan and Frank Pallone of New Jersey noted that Congress last yearordered the EPA to have the standards in place by June 22.

"Serious questions have been raised about the legality of your recentannouncement, including its effect on the intent of Congress to have a newprotective drinking water standard for arsenic," Dingell and Pallonewrote.

The new Clinton standards were to have taken effect March 23. Whitman,however, announced three days earlier that she was withdrawing them, sayingthere was not enough scientific evidence to justify the $200 million annualcost to municipalities, states and industry of meeting the new standardsby 2006.

She said in an interview later that the administration will ask Congressto extend "until the end of the calendar year" the deadline forcoming up with a new standard.

Dingell and Pallone, respectively the top Democrats on the House Energyand Commerce Committee and its environment subcommittee, asked Whitman fora detailed legal analysis of the decision.

"Our intention is to be sure that we have a good understanding oftheir legal analysis," said the committee's Democratic staff spokeswoman,Laura Sheehan. "We see it as a very clear line in the sand. Do theysee it that way?"

Whitman on Tuesday also claimed a shortage of scientific support forthe new standard.

"I wish I could point to a definitive study that said this is thelevel at which arsenic poses no threat to humans or this is the level abovewhich arsenic starts to accumulate and pose a problem," she said.

Health and environmental groups have been campaigning since 1996 to reducethe standards. The EPA acted as part of a court settlement after the NationalAcademy of Sciences found in 1999 that arsenic in drinking water can causebladder, lung and skin cancer, and might cause liver and kidney cancer.

Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, citing the study'sfinding that the current arsenic standards could result in a 1-in-100 riskof cancer, has said the Bush administration's claim that those standardsare not supported by the best available science simply is not true.

"The president is simply choosing to ignore that warning and embracea standard for drinking water that creates a cancer risk 10,000 times higherthan EPA allows for food," Daschle said last week. "It is an outrageousand indefensible decision and we are exploring every possible option toreverse it."

Meanwhile, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the senior Democrat onthe Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said Wednesday he was "fullyprepared" to seek subpoena power as a last resort in his inquiry intoBush's decision-making on the arsenic standards.

Environmentalists have complained the decision was a favor to the miningindustry, a charge Whitman denied.

"I never even considered the mining industry in the arsenic decision,"she said. "It may sound very naive, but I didn't even know they wereone of the biggest producers."

On the Net:

EPA: http://www.epa.gov

House Energy: http://www.house.gov/commerce

NET: http://environet.policy.net

NRDC: http://www.nrdc.org