WASHINGTON — When Environmental Protection Agency officials addressed the National Pork Producers Council last year about a proposed farm pollution monitoring program, they brought along a slide show to explain and promote the new rules.

Although the audience had no way of knowing it, the slide show was prepared not just by EPA staff but largely by the meat industry, which backed the new rules over the objections of environmentalists.

Internal documents show that the proposed program to monitor air pollution at livestock farms — an increasingly contentious topic in rural America — was largely conceived and heavily influenced by lobbyists for the livestock industry. The program is to be officially unveiled in coming months.

The papers also show a relationship between some EPA officials and industry lobbyists that was so close that one EPA official working on farm issues quit in frustration, and state and local government representatives walked out of negotiations.

"To save you some time, I've taken the liberty of drafting a few PowerPoint slides that you might use in that presentation," livestock industry lobbyist John Thorne wrote in a Feb. 15, 2003, e-mail to then-EPA attorney Timothy Jones.

In an e-mail on Feb. 18, 2003, Thorne sent a second set of slides to be used by EPA Associate Administrator Karen Flournoy that concludes, "The public will benefit from all of this."

Other documents show that Jones incorporated some of Thorne's slides into his presentation, while Flournoy used essentially the whole thing.

The e-mail messages are contained in hundreds of pages of documents obtained by the Sierra Club under the Freedom of Information Act and provided to the Chicago Tribune.

Some of the messages show regulators and the regulated essentially working hand in hand. For instance, in a Feb. 19, 2003, e-mail, Randy Waite of the EPA's Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards praised Thorne's slides and offered strategic suggestions to help the industry make its case.

"With good information, we can solve problems," Waite wrote. "With no information, we leave the door open to outside scare tactics."

Critics of the Bush administration contend that this is just the latest example of the Bush EPA becoming overly close with industry.

EPA officials do not dispute their close working relationship with the meat industry. But they maintain they have jointly created the first-ever program to monitor air pollution from farms, paid for by the livestock industry.

"It's true that we've been talking to the industry," said Bob Kaplan, the EPA's director of special litigation and projects. "But we've also been talking to environmental groups and anyone else who wants to say anything to us."

Still, critics call the air emissions program a sweetheart deal that indefinitely delays cleanup of noxious emissions from large-scale farms and disregards neighbors who live downwind.

Under the proposed deal, farms that sign up for a two-year monitoring program will be exempt from federal air pollution enforcement during that time. Past violations of federal air pollution laws also would be forgiven.

Industry officials hope the program also will shield participating farms from lawsuits brought by states and citizen groups.

In exchange, the farms would contribute up to $3,500 to cover the cost of the program. Only about 30 farms would be selected for monitoring, documents show.

The idea is that after two years, the EPA would have sufficient data to establish permanent air emissions standards.

The EPA is preparing the program at a time when the stench and noxious gases from large-scale livestock farms, often called "factory farms," are tearing apart some rural communities and prompting lawsuits by neighbors and environmental groups.

The furor has been fueled by rapid consolidation in the livestock industry that has vastly reduced the number of farms but greatly increased the size of those that remain. Some of the largest pig farms, for instance, have more than 100,000 hogs.

While the primary complaint is foul odors, some neighbors and scientists maintain that gases such as ammonia and hydrogen sulfide from livestock farms have caused health problems similar to those caused by industrial emissions.

To environmental groups, the monitoring plan, as proposed, is simply amnesty for polluters.

"They let everyone off the hook," said Barclay Rogers, an attorney with the Sierra Club. "Everyone who signs up gets protection. It's a ‘get out of jail free' card."

Asked about the slide show prepared by Thorne and presented by EPA officials, Rogers said: "That is being co-opted to the greatest extent the government can be. They are putting words in their mouth."

The EPA's Waite countered that the slides summarized talks he had with Thorne and that he edited them for accuracy.

Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA enforcement official who now is director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington-based watchdog group, said the agreement was simply a stalling tactic by the livestock industry.

"Industry lobbyists in Washington understand they can't defeat emission controls outright, especially where the public's health is at stake," Schaeffer said. "But they understand that time is money, so their strategy is to postpone the day of reckoning."

But Kaplan, the EPA's director of special litigation and projects, said the agency is "between a rock and a hard place" because the current laws and protocols for measuring pollution are difficult to apply to farms. The main point of the monitoring program, he said, is to establish emissions standards with which farms would have to comply.

"We are trying to do this (in) a faster, more judicious way," he said.

Jones, the then-EPA attorney who received one of Thorne's e-mail messages and now works for Tyson Foods, declined to comment. Neither Flournoy nor Thorne returned calls seeking comment.

Richard Schwartz, a lobbyist for a consortium of livestock companies called the Ag Air Group, said the livestock industry did not have too much influence on the process, adding the most recent draft is much tougher on farms than the original proposal.

"Essentially the idea of the industry paying to do a study to determine its own emissions is absolutely unique," Schwartz said. "It's tremendously advantageous to the agency."

To date, the EPA's focus when it comes to factory farms has mostly been water pollution. During the Clinton administration, the EPA pursued its first air pollution cases, against Premium Standard Farms in Missouri and Buckeye Egg in Ohio.

In December 2001, a month after Premium Standard Farms was ordered to install a wastewater treatment facility, the meat industry came to the EPA to pitch the idea for a two-tiered "safe harbor" agreement.

Under that proposal, the EPA would have imposed a moratorium on enforcing the Clean Air Act and other air pollution laws as long as the large livestock farms signed up for a program to monitor emissions. Smaller farms would be exempt from regulation altogether.

EPA officials initially rejected the idea.

"We felt that what they were trying to do was keep us from enforcing the law," said Sylvia Lowrance, who at the time was the deputy administrator for enforcement.

But Lowrance said the tone in EPA enforcement changed in the course the Bush administration took toward not supporting enforcement of environmental laws. Lowrance said she was told that her office could not pursue any more air pollution cases against farms unless senior political appointees in the EPA approved it.

"That's unprecedented in EPA," said Lowrance, who left the agency in 2002.

Michele Merkel, who worked in EPA enforcement, said she quit in 2002 because she believed the livestock industry had too much influence on federal oversight of farms.

The meat industry's "safe harbor" proposal picked up steam within the EPA in 2002.

"Based on what we've learned so far, my feeling is the EPA still wants to move forward with this and probably will," Schwartz wrote to fellow lobbyist Thorne on March 15, 2002.

Two organizations representing state and local officials — the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators and the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials — were invited to participate in meetings of the EPA and industry officials that summer. But by the end of the year, the organizations walked out.

"It appeared to us that the EPA staff was giving in far too much to the industry, and the direction was coming from somewhere in the administration to seal the deal," said Bill Becker, executive director of both organizations.

By the time EPA officials were invited to address the National Pork Producers Council — in meetings in Kansas City and Washington, D.C., in early 2003 — the livestock industry had provided a "consent agreement and final order" that included legal language for the monitoring program.

In some of the documents, government officials sound as though they consider themselves essentially partners with industry representatives — arrayed against, for example, citizens who want to file lawsuits.

In one e-mail, Waite of the EPA's Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards wrote, "We need to start getting across the idea that farms are going to continue to be vulnerable to citizen suits and this data will go a long way in helping us, in partnership, to find solutions to some of those issues, making them less vulnerable in the long run."

In an interview, Waite said protection from lawsuits is a crucial selling point to get farmers to participate in the program.

"There's got to be something in it for both sides," he said.