Senator Cardin leads fight over pesticides

Maryland Democrat raises national profile on bay, environment

By John Fritze, The Baltimore Sun
11:09 PM EDT, July 3, 2011

WASHINGTON — Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, a longtime advocate of the Chesapeake Bay, is wading into the high-profile debate over the federal regulation of pesticides—instantly putting him at odds with fellow Democrats while potentially raising his national profile on environmental issues.

Maryland’s junior senator is threatening to filibuster a proposal to limit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s oversight of pesticides that end up in the nation’s waterways, including the bay. The move, which at the very least will delay the legislation, has set off a behind-the-scenes scramble among advocates who hope to override him if he carries through on the threat.

For his part, Cardin said he believes the proposal needed slowing down.

“Pesticides have a direct impact on our water,” Cardin, 67, said in an interview. “The hold allows us to use a more deliberative process and that gives us more of a chance to review” the legislation.

His decision to hold up the legislation, which sailed through the House of Representatives on a bipartisan vote in March and had recently been approved by a Senate committee, was the latest effort by Cardin to address clean water, an area in which the veteran lawmaker has taken a growing interest since coming to the Senate in 2007.

In April, he chaired a hearing on the natural gas drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing. Federal and state officials are studying the environmental impact of “fracking.”

A month later, he introduced a bill to require that new federal highways capture polluted runoff after a storm, arguing that every inch of rain that falls on a mile of two-lane highway produces 52,000 gallons of contaminated water.

Finally, Cardin expects to reintroduce a comprehensive proposal this year that he says will strengthen cleanup of the Chesapeake. That measure, which failed to pass last year, requires states to craft plans to meet 2025 cleanup targets and would then prod officials by threatening to cut off federal funds.

The environmental news service Greenwire recently described Cardin as “the Senate’s ‘King of Water.’”

“He’s really emerged as the go-to person in the United States Senate on clean water,” said Doug Siglin, federal affairs director for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

The bill was introduced by Rep. Bob Gibbs, an Ohio Republican, in a response to a 2009 federal appeals court decision that required farmers and others using pesticides to obtain a special permit from the EPA and submit to more strict regulations. The implementation of that ruling, which has repeatedly been delayed, is set for October.