A group of two dozen centrist Republicans and Democrats is preparing legislation to fundamentally change the way the government regulates environmental protection, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., one of the framers of the legislation, said Tuesday.
The bill has evolved out of nine months of meetings with moderate pro-environment members who have discussed the "second generation" of environmental regulation. Boehlert said the idea is to give industry and states more flexibility to "meet strict, usually federal, standards and expect more accountability in return."
Boehlert told a meeting of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership the bill will present "a conceptual framework that has been floating around this town for several years now."
The group working on the bill includes Reps. James Greenwood, R- Pa., Calvin Dooley, D-Calif., Amo Houghton, R-N.Y., Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., Michael Castle, R-Del., Wayne Gilchrest, R- Md., James Moran, D-Va., and more than 10 others.
The bill would give the EPA "clear statutory authority and encouragement to try out innovative approaches" to regulation, Boehlert said. It includes several safeguards to prevent "backsliding," including a requirement that the "experimental approach" be removed if it does not have better results than the existing regulation.
The bill also would require the EPA to "streamline, focus and update its information requirements" in order to reduce the industry's reporting requirements and ensure the data the EPA makes public is accurate. Boehlert said the bill would strive to ensure that the "public should have better, more accurate, more easily accessible information that will tell people more about the actual state of the environment."
The group will begin circulating a draft of the bill by the end of next week, Boehlert said, but the bill "needs a lot of work before it is ready to introduce," which could take several months. Even when it is introduced, aides said, its supporters would be open to major revisions.
Debra Knopman, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, said "we may not see [such a] bill passing" this year, but it gives moderates the "opportunity to lay the long-lasting foundation for a bipartisan partnership" on environment policy.
"It envisions improvements in the regulatory system that will be incremental, though significant-but that has been the way progress has been made all along," Boehlert said, referring to several early clean air and water statutes that Congress passed "before we got a clear sense of what would work."
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