Environmental advocates say state Rep. Jan Malik, D-Warren, Barrington, tried his best to get passage of legislation raising maximum fines against industrial polluters to $25,000 — a change that was ultimately doomed when the General Assembly ended its 2008 session.

But Dana Joseph Peloso, Malik’s Republican challenger in House District 67, blames Malik for the demise of the bill in his role as the chairman of the House Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources.

Peloso said it is an “absolute outrage” that Malik would act as the “docile servant” of the Democratic House leadership, particularly Majority Leader Gordon Fox.

An article in the Providence Sunday Journal last Sunday detailed negotiations surrounding bipartisan legislation during the final days of the General Assembly session.

The sponsors of the companion bills, Democratic state Sen. Walter E. Felag Jr., and Republican state Rep. Joseph N. Amaral, both said Malik worked very hard to try to get the bill passed.

Environmental advocates, including Gail Corvello of Tiverton, Bob Ballou of the state Department of Environmental Management, and Laura Brion of the Childhood Lead Action Project, also said in interviews that Malik strongly favored the bill and tried to get clearance for a vote from the House Democratic leadership.

But legal questions from lobbyist Robert Goldberg about the DEM role in enforcing environmental regulations got the attention of House Speaker William S. Murphy and majority leader Fox.

And those questions were not answered before the clock ran out on the session on Saturday, June 21.

Goldberg, a former Senate minority leader, was hired for $45,000 on May 1 by the Texas-based utility Southern Union, which is a defendant in a DEM enforcement action in Tiverton and a parallel lawsuit in U.S. District Court over soil pollution in Corvello’s neighborhood in North Tiverton.

Peloso issued a statement that said Malik is “like many other members of the House who seem to think they are owed their position and that they can ignore the needs of the citizens when it’s convenient.”

“This must change,” Peloso said.

Peloso, a recent graduate of Roger Williams University, was one of two students removed from a campus radio show last year for repeating a phrase that got the nationally syndicated talk-show host Don Imus fired. He also was a local organizer of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Malik owns a liquor store in Warren and works in the town’s Public Works Department. He has served in the House 12 years and has chaired the House environmental committee for about half the 2008 session.

Malik said Peloso’s statement was riddled with inaccuracies, misquoting Corvello and saying he, as committee chairman, tried to block Felag’s bill.

Felag’s bill had already passed the Senate and needed only House approval and the governor’s signature to become law.

The Sunday Journal article reported that Malik and other members of his committee wore stickers endorsing both Felag’s and Amaral’s bills as they were originally written.

Ultimately, environmentalists would not accept a compromise proposed by lobbyist Goldberg that would have eliminated DEM enforcement of remediation orders against industrial polluters, authorizing only the Superior Court to issue fines.

Malik asked Felag to prevail on the Senate Democratic leadership to try to persuade their counterparts in the House of the merits of the legislation, according to Malik, Ballou, the DEM legislative liaison, and others.

Had Malik brought Felag’s bill to a vote in the environmental committee and sent it to the House floor without the nod of the leadership, he would have been replaced as committee chairman “within days,” said Amaral.

Malik himself suggested that moving Felag’s bill to a vote would have been akin to “committing hara-kiri.”

Amaral said he knew Malik “was pushing this agenda very, very hard with the leadership.

“Nothing happens without the concurrence of the leadership,” Amaral said. “There’s a concentration of power delegated to too few individuals,” he said.

gmacris@projo.com