From yesterday's San Jose Mercury News, "Fewer polluters punished under Bush, records show":

The Bush administration is catching and punishing far fewer polluters than the two previous administrations, according to a Knight Ridder analysis of 15 years of environmental-enforcement records.

Civil enforcement of pollution laws peaked when the president's father, George H.W. Bush, was in office from 1989-93 and has fallen ever since, but it's plummeted since George W. Bush took office three years ago. That's according to records of 17 different categories of enforcement activity obtained by Knight Ridder through the Freedom of Information Act.

William K. Reilly, the EPA administrator under the first President Bush, said he told his enforcers that "under no circumstances do I want the numbers to drop. It's your job to bring in these cases."

Violation notices against polluters are the most important enforcement tool, experts say, and they've had the biggest drop under the current President Bush. The monthly average of violation notices since January 2001 has dropped 58 percent compared with the Clinton administration's monthly average.

Those pollution citations dropped 12 percent from 2001 to 2002, and another 35 percent from 2002 through the first 10 months of 2003.

Punishing polluters - by fines or referrals for prosecution - has dropped as well, but not as dramatically. Administrative fines since January 2001 are down 28 percent, when adjusted for inflation, from Clinton administration levels. Civil penalties average 6 percent less, when adjusted for inflation. And the number of cases referred to the Justice Department for prosecution is down 5 percent.

Some current EPA enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from their bosses, say they're getting the signal to slow down enforcement cases.

"It's very discouraging," said one official. "We're concerned about people's health. We have a job that we're supposed to be doing and we're not doing it. And we should be."

However, administrative orders to stop some polluting activity - a quick technique used for more mundane cases - are up 14 percent under the Bush administration.

"There's definitely less emphasis on enforcement," said Dave Ullrich, who retired this summer after 30 years at the Environmental Protection Agency, including jobs in enforcement and as a deputy regional administrator.

The EPA will brief congressional officials Thursday on its enforcement statistics and will outline new counting methods.

Knight Ridder examined EPA data in 17 categories and subcategories of civil enforcement since January 1989 and compared the records of the past three administrations.

In 13 of those 17 categories, the Bush administration had lower average numbers than the Clinton administration. And in 11 of those categories, the 2003 average was lower than the 2001 average, showing the trend increasing over time.

"It tells you somebody's not minding the enforcement store," said Sylvia Lowrance, a 24-year EPA veteran who was the agency's acting enforcement chief under Bush from January 2001 to July 2002.

Bush administration officials said the EPA is enforcing anti-pollution laws, just in a more effective way.

"The agency has what we refer to as `smart enforcement,'" EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt said in an interview with Knight Ridder. "Our focus is on enforcement that changes behavior in a positive way."

That means working with companies to get them to fix problems instead of being punishment-oriented, Leavitt and his predecessor, Christine Todd Whitman, have said.

Someone should explain 'smart enforcement' to John Ashcroft.