The Bush administration's environmental enforcement record is the worst in 15 years and promises to get poorer during a second term, according to environmental organizations that analyzed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency civil lawsuits and penalties.

The $56.8 million in civil penalties collected during fiscal 2004 is the lowest amount since 1990, the Environmental Integrity Project and the Natural Resources Defense Council said yesterday.

More telling may be a decline of 75 percent in the number of lawsuits filed over the last three years against companies for violating federal environmental laws, compared to the previous three years of the Clinton administration -- from 152 cases to 36.

Eric Schaeffer, Integrity Project director and former EPA civil enforcement chief, said he expects four more years of "lax federal enforcement" and an administration proposal to break up the EPA's central enforcement office.

He also said that state environmental agencies and citizen lawsuits will have to "step in" to tackle the most egregious violations.

"If we want our environmental laws to survive we had better be prepared to make creative use of the opportunities we have in a federal system," Schaeffer said. "We'll need to put pressure on state agencies to enforce the law when EPA won't, and to hold both federal and state elected officials accountable when agencies fail to protect the public."

Cynthia Bergman, EPA spokeswoman, said Schaeffer is making "quite a leap" to take one year of enforcement penalties and try to predict what will happen in the future. She said EPA will release its final enforcement numbers for fiscal 2004 in the next couple of weeks.

The Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, an organization of electric power generating companies, challenged the environmental groups' premise that enforcement actions have declined and said the Bush administration is continuing to pursue enforcement cases against more than 20 power companies.

Schaeffer said the administration is taking credit for cases settled or started by the previous administration but has filed few of its own.

EPA records cited by the environmental groups show that Clean Air Act enforcement actions had declined from 61 cases filed in the last three years of the Clinton administration to nine filed in the first three years of the Bush administration.

John Walke, director of NRDC's Clean Air Program, said the EPA will likely cut back its enforcement efforts against large industrial air pollution emitters even more than it did during Bush's first term by continuing to cut enforcement budgets.

"They likely will cut back enforcement efforts against polluters, especially the coal-fired power plants and oil refineries," Walke said. "The EPA also could drop new source review cases it inherited from the Clinton administration."

The Bush administration has made changes to the Clean Air Act rule known as "new source review" that required old, dirty coal-burning power plants to install modern pollution control equipment when they made modifications considered more than routine maintenance. The new rule suspends that requirement -- even if the changes cause more pollution -- if the cost of the modifications doesn't exceed 20 percent of the cost of replacing the entire facility.

Nationally, there are 540 power plants and 17,000 older industrial facilities that are affected by the new rule.

According to the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, the administration won more than $203 million in penalties in fiscal 2003 and more than $4 billion in injunctive relief -- that is commitments by polluters to remedy environmental violations.

But $128 million of the $203 million in penalties the council is counting in 2003 came through a stipulated penalty for missing a deadline contained in a 1998 settlement agreement with Caterpillar on a diesel truck emissions case. Such stipulated penalties are not traditionally counted in the year's penalty payment total.

Schaeffer said $3.2 billion of the more than $4 billion in injunctive relief came in a Dominion electric power case settled in November 2000 and a sewage pollution case brought against Los Angeles in January 2001, both before President Bush was inaugurated.

"They're right to point out the big settlements, and it's great that they brought them home and the companies are paying off old debts, but those are all legacy cases," Schaeffer said.

According to the environmental groups, the EPA collected penalties totaling $61.1 million in 1990; $72.3 million in 1991; $90.8 million in 1992; $72 million in 1993; $90.5 million in 1994; $64.9 million in 1995; $96 million in 1996; $94.5 million in 1997; $89 million in 1998; $164 million in 1999; $82.7 million in 2000; $121.7 million in 2001; $90 million in 2002 and $96 million in 2003.