PROVIDENCE — Whenever clean water and open space bond issues go before Rhode Island voters, they generally pass by wide margins. But voters probably won’t get an opportunity to express their opinion on some $35 million in bonds proposed by Governor Carcieri this year, because the House Finance Committee revealed yesterday it cut the bonds from the state budget.

The cuts will cause the loss of millions more dollars for clean water and open space because the state bonds are used to attract funding from the federal government and other sources. The impact will probably be felt most at the municipal level because much of the money was targeted for local pollution-reduction efforts.

Environmental leaders reacted with anger and disappointment, mixed with some appreciation of the state’s financial woes.

“We could be repeating history,” said outgoing Save the Bay executive director Curt Spalding. “This is how the Bay got so polluted in the first place.”

Two years ago, Carcieri proposed an $85-million bond issue to continue cleaning up Narragansett Bay and to preserve farms and open space. He made the proposal at the height of his reelection campaign, but he was also framing it as part of his response to the dramatic 2003 fish kill in Greenwich Bay.

The General Assembly killed that bond proposal. This year, for the 2009 budget, Carcieri reduced the bond proposal to $35 million.

Shortly after 4 p.m. yesterday, the House Finance Committee quickly approved a budget article that contained $87 million for transportation bonds. But the $35 million originally earmarked for “Open Space, Recreation, Bay and Watershed Protection” was deleted from the budget article. There was no public discussion.

Spalding said Save the Bay will continue lobbying, but he is concerned that the budget will now be on a fast track.

“We know there was support for this in many quarters,” he said. “But the budget process is not widely participatory. The budget is a big political football and people are afraid to mess with it.”

The bond issue would have provided $5 million for open space, farmland preservation and recreational development. Another $30 million would have been split, with half going to communities to help them reduce stormwater runoff and the other half to help communities upgrade their sewer plants.

Rupert Friday, head of the Rhode Island Land Trust Council, said that killing the bond issue means the state will soon run out of money for open space and farmland conservation. Losing the farmland money is more unfortunate this year, he said, because the federal funding was slated to double from the $2.5 million to $3 million Rhode Island usually gets each year. But it requires a 50-50 match.

The $15 million for water pollution would have gone to the state’s Clean Water Finance Agency, which uses state money to leverage federal funds and other bonds.

The $15 million would have allowed the state to increase the amount available to loan at low interest rates to communities in 2010 from $38 million to $64 million, according to Anthony B. Simeone, executive director of the agency.

Looking ahead to 2018, the cut will reduce the amount of loan money available from $521 million to $483 million, Simeone said. But he said he can understand that everyone has to tighten their budgets, given the state of the economy and the state budget crisis.

plord@projo.com