fairness." At Nethercutt's invitation, EPA Administrator Christie Whitman will be in Spokane on Monday to hear views on the cleanup from business and environmental groups at a closed-door session. She'll visit North Idaho on Tuesday.
"Administrator Whitman seems to be a fair-minded person. I wanted to have her come here first," he said.
Whitman also will attend a $250-a-head campaign event for Nethercutt on Monday evening in Spokane. Cabinet members need White House approval for such appearances.
On Tuesday, she'll embark on an early morning boat tour of Lake Coeur d'Alene with 100 local leaders, including newspaper publisher Duane Hagadone, mining magnate Harry Magnuson and Gov. Dirk Kempthorne.
Fearing a negative impact on tourism, Idaho politicians have pressed EPA to delist the lake from Superfund. The EPA's proposed regional cleanup plan omits work in the lake, focusing on the worst heavy metals contamination upstream and in the Spokane River.
Whitman also will tour the Silver Valley by bus with Idaho's congressional delegation and meet with the Coeur d'Alene Tribe and environmental groups at the Cataldo Mission.
Rep. Butch Otter, R-Idaho, hasn't decided yet whether to support the EPA's cleanup plan. Otter "is withholding judgment for now," said spokesman Mark Warbis.
Otter and other Idaho politicians have asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the science behind EPA's cleanup assumptions. The academy has agreed to do the review -- if Congress can find $820,000 to pay for it.
An alliance with an EPA administrator is new for Nethercutt, who voted in 1995 to slash EPA's enforcement budget by 50 percent and clashed with Carol Browner, Bill Clinton's EPA chief.
But Nethercutt no longer supports drastic cuts in the EPA. With Bush in the White House, he and other Republicans have stopped trying to curtail the agency's enforcement powers by passing amendments -- known as riders -- that cut its budget.
Heavy use of riders isn't necessary now that there's a Republican president in the White House, he said.
"We feel we can trust the Bush administration on the Republican side of the aisle," he said.
Nethercutt hasn't completely renounced the use of riders as a legislative tactic when he disagrees with the administration on other issues, he added. His rider to the Agriculture Department budget bill would lift more sanctions on Cuba, something the Bush White House opposes. He used a similar tactic in 2000 to open agriculture trade to Cuba, despite objections from House GOP leaders.
Nethercutt's reflexive trust in business ethics to protect the environment was hammered by the recent wave of corporate scandals, from Enron to WorldCom.
In a 1995 interview, he said he believed most corporations would voluntarily do the right thing for the environment without government regulation. Now he has doubts.
"There should be a business ethic," he said. "We should take more care with extraction issues; we are a different country now."
He calls "unconscionable" the behavior of companies like W.R. Grace, whose vermiculite mine in Libby, Mont., sickened hundreds of workers and townspeople by exposing them to deadly tremolite asbestos. Libby recently was named a Superfund site.
The "corporate greed " of multimillionaire CEOs also has sobered him, he said.
Critics, however, say Nethercutt's voting record isn't much greener now.
"The Republican position is cut taxes and deregulation. That's their mantra," said Bart Haggin, Nethercutt's Democratic opponent in this fall's election.
Haggin is a longtime environmental activist who is taking a leave from his position on The Lands Council to run for Congress. He's critical of the eight-year GOP incumbent's environmental record.
Haggin supports reauthorizing the Superfund tax on corporations -- which Nethercutt opposes. He describes the meetings with Whitman over the Silver Valley cleanup as Nethercutt "looking for some green stripes."
But Haggin agrees with Nethercutt that cleanup should start, with money from the general fund if the Superfund tax can't be reauthorized.
Those costs should be repaid later in any final legal settlement with the mining companies responsible for the pollution or from future Superfund money after the tax is reauthorized, he said.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., senses a shift among Northwest Republicans on the issue of EPA and the cleanup of major pollution sites.
She said she's glad the Idaho delegation has persuaded Whitman to tour the Silver Valley, and that the EPA administrator accepted Nethercutt's invitation to stop first in Spokane.
"It's vital to see the connection (of the Silver Valley) to Washington state and the city of Spokane," Cantwell said. "When you lay your eyes on the Spokane River running through the city ... the picture does say a thousand words."
Cantwell sits on committees that will hold hearings next month on reauthorizing the Superfund tax on the oil and chemical industries.
A parallel bill, in the House Ways and Means Committee, has the support of Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash.
Like Nethercutt, the Bush administration opposes reauthorizing the tax, which put money into a special fund that paid for cleanup when polluting companies went broke or couldn't be found. That's what happened in the Silver Valley after Gulf Resources moved its assets offshore and declared bankruptcy in 1993.
With heavy lobbying from industry, the Republican-controlled Congress let the Superfund tax law lapse in 1995. The fund has shrunk from $3.6 billion in 1995 to $28 million projected for 2003. It will be broke by 2004.
Rather than raise taxes, Republicans are suggesting paying for Superfund out of the general fund. That's likely to be a tough sell, Cantwell said.
"The public does not want to get stuck with the bill," she said.
The concept that "the polluter pays" resonates with the public, said Dan Vicuna, a spokesman for the League of Conservation Voters.
Like many organizations, the League scores all members of Congress each year on about a dozen votes it considers key to the nation's environmental policy.
Nethercutt consistently scores in single digits for the league votes. He usually scores above 90 percent for the League of Private Property Voters, which advocates less government interference on landowners.
Nethercutt, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he thinks the bid to reauthorize the Superfund tax will fail.
"This is a tough climate to increase any taxes," he said.
Vicuna, of the League of Conservation Voters, said the recent corporate scandals will make it harder to convince the public that businesses can be trusted to clean up their messes without a regulatory hammer.
Federal law requires publicly traded companies to report on their financial statements to investors the liability they face from cleaning up pollution.
A recent study of Securities and Exchange Commission and EPA documents shows many companies don't comply with that law and "underreport" their environmental liability, said Grant Cope of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, another organization that tracks environmental issues.
Cope is skeptical of Republican proposals to give money to the states and turn cleanup over to them, rather than having the EPA oversee the operations under Superfund.
"There's no credence to the claim that states can do it better, faster, cleaner," he said. "The feds have the technical expertise, superior enforcement powers and can look beyond parochial state interests."
