PROVIDENCE — In a meeting of the House environmental committee on the next-to-last day of the legislative session, all the members had worn neon yellow stickers publicly declaring their support for companion bills that would raise maximum fines against industrial polluters from $1,000 to $25,000 a day — without compromise.

The committee chairman, wearing his own yellow sticker, said he was determined to bring one of the identical bills up for a vote and get it on the House floor, even if it cost him his chairmanship.

But the committee vote never materialized.

Asked why, the committee chairman, state Rep. Jan Malik, D-Warren, said he could only take the issue to “a certain level” of the Democratic hierarchy in the House.

“I hate being on the spot,” Malik said. “I can only say so much.”

Watching legislation with broad support slip away during the final moments of the legislative session was an “eye-opener,” said Gail Corvello, one of 100 North Tiverton homeowners who have lived with the far-reaching constraints of soil pollution in their back yards for the last six years. Since blue-tinged soil laced with cyanide was discovered under Bay Street in August 2002, homeowners have been unable to sell or refinance their homes, or disturb the soil in anyway, even to plant flowers or vegetables.

The legislative process “makes you think twice about living in Rhode Island,” she said.

Corvello, and others who were directly involved in last-minute negotiations, say the experience had nothing to do with the merits of the legislation.

Rather, they say, the comings and goings from closed-door meetings in Malik’s office illustrate the way a well-paid and well-connected lobbyist — Robert Goldberg — was able to get the attention of the House leadership long enough to delay a bill until the clock ran out on the session — without any public discussion.

Goldberg, who represents the utility giant Southern Union, disagrees with that portrayal. He said he raised substantive legal questions about the bill.

Southern Union has been named the responsible party in the contamination of 50 acres of residential property in Corvello’s North Tiverton neighborhood and has been fined $1,000 a day for more than two years under existing law.

The penalties have been held in abeyance, however, while Southern Union appeals a Department of Environmental Management remediation order. At this point, it appears that the best chance for settling the dispute lies in U.S. District Court, rather than in an administrative adjudication process under way at DEM.

A change in the Industrial Pollution Remediation and Reuse Act would not affect the outcome of the Tiverton case, but it could have an impact on more than 100 other contaminated sites in Rhode Island, according to DEM officials.

Last year, the House passed a bill that would have hiked the ceiling on penalties for recalcitrant corporate polluters to $50,000 a day. But that bill died in the Senate in the last moments of the 2007 session after Southern Union hired lobbyist Andrew Annaldo to get the ear of the Senate leadership.

Southern Union paid Annaldo $20,000.

This year, the utility paid Goldberg $45,000.

By all accounts, Malik needed a green light from the House leadership — House Majority Leader Gordon Fox in particular — before he could call for a vote on a bill in his own committee. And that signal did not come.

Efforts to reach Fox were unsuccessful last week.

Corvello said she tried to speak to Fox in the hall, calling his name as she ran after him. “He turned around, and he put up his hand,” Corvello recalled.

“He said, ‘I need to think.’ He didn’t even address me. I was mortified,” she said.

Corvello continued, “What gives him the power to decide for all the voters in Rhode Island that this bill should not be heard?”

“They’re all supposed to have a voice on what gets voted on and how it gets voted,” she said.

“If this is politics in Rhode Island, this is ridiculous,” Corvello said.

The bipartisan legislation, companion bills sponsored by Sen. Walter E. Felag Jr., D-Warren, and Rep. Joseph N. Amaral, R-Tiverton, was intended to put the the Industrial Pollution Remediation and Reuse Act on a par with other environmental statutes.

Laws governing water pollution, oil control, hazardous waste and solid waste all carry maximum penalties of $25,000 a day for noncompliance with remediation orders. Neighboring states — Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey — also have maximum penalties of $25,000 a day.

Felag’s bill sailed through the Senate and had been heard without opposition in Malik’s committee in early April, along with Amaral’s identical proposal.

A total of 24 health and environmental groups supported the bills. No one testified in opposition.

Malik said he couldn’t understand why the other DEM pollution and remediation laws carried maximum fines of $25,000 but the applicable law in the Tiverton case did not.

“That bothered me,” he said.

That’s why he tried to work out language to satisfy both sides, he said.

“A lot of stuff is bartered at the end of the session,” Malik said.

In the end, the deal-breaker was not the amount of the fine — $25,000 a day — but an amendment put forth by lobbyist Goldberg to give the Superior Court the exclusive authority to impose penalties, cutting the DEM out of the process.

Amaral, the sponsor of the House bill, said the move was nothing less than an attempt to emasculate the DEM.

In a telephone interview last week, Goldberg maintained that DEM’s enforcement role lacked due process. Goldberg, a lawyer, said he spoke for himself, not as a representative of Southern Union.

“DEM serves as judge, jury and executioner in these situations,” he said.

“What is the downside of having a judge in the Superior Court and a jury decide?” he said.

“The state Constitution guarantees everyone a right to a jury trial when you get into these punitive actions,” Goldberg said. “I don’t understand why DEM would object,” Goldberg said. “It sounds like an ego thing. Are they trying to help people or trying to build a kingdom?”

Goldberg’s questions got the attention of the House leadership.

House Speaker William Murphy said in a statement, “One of our major concerns was that the legislation allowed a department director to levy fines in the amount of $25,000 per day without any judicial process.”

But Amaral said having to turn to the overburdened court system every time there’s an environmental fine is “outrageous.” He characterized Goldberg’s objections as “a lot of rhetoric to benefit his client.”

And Felag said bypassing the DEM in the imposition of environmental fines “didn’t make sense.” Administrative adjudication of penalties set by a wide array of government agencies flows from a well-established legal principle dating back to the 1930s, according to Jared Goldstein, a professor at the Roger Williams University School of Law who specializes in environmental issues.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can give federal agencies the power to create regulations with the force of law, as long as administrative appeals adhere to the principles of due process and the agency decisions can be reviewed by the courts, he said.

Most of the states, including Rhode Island, have their own laws that adhere to the principle established by the high court, he said.

Malik, meanwhile, said Goldberg “was pushing his agenda very, very hard with the [House] leadership.”

Fox, the House majority leader, had publicly voiced his support for the bill on the House floor, Amaral said.

But the House leadership “didn’t work diligently enough to find a compromise. They didn’t have the will to do it. They said one thing and did another,” said Amaral. “Nothing happens without the concurrence of the leadership,” he said. “There is no discretion given to committees.

“If they don’t vote the way the leadership wants, their personal bills don’t get passed. People don’t get promoted or put into certain places,” Amaral said.

“The concentration of power is delegated to too few individuals,” he said.

Bob Ballou, the DEM’s legislative liaison, questioned the need to negotiate at the last minute on an issue that had been thoroughly vetted.

Ballou said he would never deny anyone’s right to try to have a say in the legislative process.

But he questioned why the interest of Southern Union, a Texas-based utility under sanction by the DEM, should get consideration of House leaders at the expense of legislation intended to safeguard the well-being of all Rhode Islanders.

“To be there on the last day, literally, of the session and trying to navigate an issue like this is very disconcerting,” Ballou said.

gmacris@projo.com