By Don Phillips
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 21, 1996; Page A16

Federico Peña came to the Transportation Department as an unknown quantity, just as he is coming to the Energy Department as an unknown.

His only claim to transportation expertise was that as mayor of Denver he had engineered the building of a new airport, and he had served as head of Clinton's transportation transition team. There seems to be even less claim to expertise in the energy field.

However, Peña is likely to bring to the Energy Department the same enthusiastic management style he demonstrated at the Transportation Department. It was a style that sometimes served him well, but often contributed to his problems.

Peña always seemed to be a mayor at heart, not a Washington bureaucrat. He openly expressed frustration at the slow pace of getting anything done in the federal government, and he appeared to be comfortable in the job only when he could take an activist role. Disaster situations were made for Peña's style.

However, a disaster – the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 near Miami – turned into the greatest professional disaster of Peña's tenure. Standing near the site where 110 bodies still lay buried, he declared ValuJet to be a safe airline. The statement was a major public relations blunder, especially after numerous documents surfaced saying the Federal Aviation Administration had concerns about ValuJet's safety.

One top House staff member who deals with transportation matters expressed surprise yesterday that the ValuJet incident alone did not remove Peña from consideration for another federal job.

"I thought he was damaged goods," the aide said.

The airline industry viewed Peña with derision at the end of his term, as someone who injected too much politics into the FAA to the point it interfered with the FAA's safety function.

Part of the industry's attitude may have grown from nervousness over Peña's tendency to inject himself directly into popular but potentially costly issues normally left to the FAA rule-making process, including his "one level of safety" program for commuter airlines.

But the airline industry also applauded his energetic efforts to open foreign air routes to U.S. airlines. While he did not succeed in opening London's Heathrow Airport, he had successes in opening other world markets.

One of Peña's finest hours was his earthquake recovery effort in Los Angeles in 1993. He flew into town with fires still burning and within days had cajoled local jurisdictions to work together, at the same time eliminating federal red tape that could have delayed reconstruction of highways and rail lines. Millions of dollars flowed into the earthquake area, and recovery was faster than predicted.

As transportation secretary, Peña was the ultimate good soldier, often doing the bidding of the White House with prodigious energy. He was a tireless political campaigner.

He was also a fast learner who was well-liked by most of the people he worked with, although there were complaints that he surrounded himself with an inner circle of friends and political allies and did not always listen to the more senior staff.

Reactions to Peña's nomination from the energy community yesterday were somewhat tentative.

"America's oil and natural gas producers are surprised by the choice of Federico Peña," said Lew O. Ward, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. "Topping our list of priorities in 1997 will be to meet Mr. Peña."

Carol Werner, of the Environment and Energy Study Institute said, "As transportation secretary he is very familiar with the whole nexus between transportation, energy and the environment."

Peña is headed for a department that faces numerous challenges. Republicans have been increasingly impatient with the DOE over its inability to resolve an impasse over the search for permanent nuclear waste storage sites.

This week, Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) blasted the administration after DOE officials acknowledged they could not meet a 1998 deadline for accepting commercial nuclear waste.

In a letter to Clinton, he warned that committee members "will make this a key point during confirmation hearings for your nominee" – whomever it turns out to be.

"We trust you will select a man or woman who has the background and backbone to discharge this weighty responsibility," Murkowski wrote.

Staff writer Joby Warrick contributed to this report.