Clean-air activists Tuesday repudiated Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Mike Leavitt's claim that last week's election results validated the Bush administration's environmental record and charged that civil penalties against polluters hit a 15-year-low during his first year leading the agency.
    But environmentalists can't explain why voters, if they truly are displeased with EPA's industry-friendly approach to safeguarding public health, didn't demonstrate greater displeasure at the ballot box. 
    "There's a paradox where the American public strongly supports clean air and water and healthy food, but they don't rank those issues at the top of things that motivates them when they vote," said John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Clean Air Program. "I haven't seen a compelling explanation for it."
    Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA enforcement official who now heads the Environmental Integrity Project, said Leavitt can rightly claim air quality is better now than it has been in years. But Schaeffer said   Leavitt is merely reaping the benefits of long-standing laws that he now is trying to weaken.
    "There's a lag time between the bad decisions that are made as far as policy and the impact on human health and environment," said Schaeffer.
    "It's a challenging issue for the environmental community. I don't think the [Democratic presidential nominee John] Kerry campaign made a significant enough investment in the issue."
    The groups released an analysis of EPA civil penalty data that showed the agency imposed $56.4 million in penalties in 2004, the lowest amount since data became available in 1990 and a drop of $40 million from the previous year.
    But the agency's current enforcement director said it's "ridiculous" to draw sweeping conclusions from single-year penalty totals, since the amounts do not reflect the ongoing nature of pollution-violation cases.
    "You cannot look at the penalty numbers for a given year and extrapolate that into a story about what enforcement is going to look like for the next four years,"   said Tom Skinner, acting administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance. EPA will release comprehensive enforcement statistics for the past year within the next three weeks, said a spokesperson for Leavitt, who is in Mexico City for meetings of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Council.
    In an interview with the New York Times published Monday, Leavitt said Bush's re-election was "a validation of our philosophy and agenda" to clean up the environment using market-based incentives.