Fairfax Challenger Straddles The Environmental Line

George Lamb, president of the Fairfax League of Conservation Voters, said Baise rebuffed multiple requests to answer the group's candidate questionnaire.

Baise said he hasn't filled out any candidate questionnaires, calling them "self-serving." He said criticism from Connolly and environmental groups discounts a generation's worth of strides.

When he and Ruckelshaus "came into power, lakes and rivers were burning, for God's sakes. We've had enormous progress," Baise said. "We are all polluters," he added, calling his years of environmental litigation a search for a responsible balance between commerce and public health.

"If you want to have zero discharges, you shut this country down," he said.

Baise is currently fighting an EPA proposal to phase out the use of liquid carbofuran, an agricultural insecticide made by one of his clients, FMC. The government, which banned the granular form of the product several years ago, says that carbofuran, which is used by corn, cotton and alfalfa farmers to control rootworm and weevils, is deadly to birds. Baise says it is an example of regulatory excess.

"More birds are killed by cats than by carbofuran," he said.

Baise has also faced off with the EPA on wetlands, an area of enforcement he regards as the epicenter of EPA's zealotry. In the mid-1980s, he represented a company planning a shopping mall on 82 acres in South Attleboro, Mass., that encompassed 50 acres of wetlands known as Sweedens Swamp.

The EPA vetoed the Army Corps of Engineers' approval of the plan because the developer had alternative sites available at the time it entered the market to search for land. The courts sided with the EPA.

If elected, Baise said, he would bring an aggressive environmental agenda to Fairfax. Since becoming a candidate, he said, he has received reports that the county has a serious problem regulating construction site runoff. He said he would push for better protection of the Chesapeake watershed. He also promised a hard look at the size of the county's fleet of more than 1,100 vehicles.

Last year, The Washington Post reported that county employees were running up the odometers on government cars to meet the annual minimum mileage required to retain those vehicles.

"Fairfax County," Baise said, "is probably one of the biggest polluters around here."