Washington - President-elect Barack Obama's choice to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is poised to easily overcome questions about her record when she appears on Wednesday at a hearing on her selection to lead the agency.

    New Jersey environmentalists are divided over Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer and former EPA employee who went on to lead the state's Department of Environmental Protection. New Jersey has more long-festering hazardous-waste sites than any other state. To some people, Jackson failed to rise to that challenge, by delaying and through steps that favored companies.

    But in the U.S. Senate, the little-known EPA nominee is garnering bipartisan support. Democrats say that she will surely be an improvement on the Bush administration's top environmental regulator, Stephen Johnson. Republicans praise her personal qualities.

    "She's accessible and reasonable," said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a climate-change skeptic who is the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, before which she will testify. "I plan to support her."

    The warm reception contrasts with a debate in New Jersey environmental circles. One controversy involves Jackson's handling of chromium, a carcinogen that built up in the state as factories began to give away the waste to use as construction fill. By the time Jackson became the top environmental regulator in 2006, a community group had successfully sued Honeywell International Inc. (HON) over one such contaminated site. The company was forced to do a thorough cleanup of the soil rather than simply capping it.

    Toughening, Then Loosening a Standard

    Jackson in early 2007 responded in two ways. She reinstated a practice of giving final approval to cleanups, the type of certainty that polluters seek. But she also issued a tough new standard for removing chromium from sites to be developed for homes or schools. Under the new standard, hexavalent chromium could make up no more than 20 parts per million of soil. That cheered environmentalists - temporarily.

    In September 2008, asshe was leaving the agency, Jackson reversed course and reaffirmed the old standard of 240 parts per million of hexavalent chromium. She acted even after a long-awaited National Toxicology Program report found that the waste was more damaging than previously thought.

    "Her commitment to developing cleanup standards based on science and not politics turned out to be empty," said Joe Morris, an organizer with the Interfaith Community Organization, the group that sued Honeywell. "She's exceeded even the irresponsibility of some of her predecessors here."

    Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a network of government employees who blow the whistle on environmental malfeasance, says that under Jackson, New Jersey failed to warn parents for months about mercury contamination in a day-care center located in a former thermometer factory. For children, the main health effect of exposure is impaired neurological development, the EPA has warned.

    Nick Shapiro, a spokesman for the Obama transition team, declined to comment on those specific allegations. In an email, he said that during Jackson's tenure as New Jersey's top environmental regulator, Jackson strengthened enforcement of environmental rules and charted a way to address a backlog of cleanups, among other accomplishments. He noted that she was operating at a time of shrinking state budgets.

    Shapiro didn't elaborate. New Jersey has 38 of the 144 sites that were on the EPA's Superfund list before 1986, according to a report by the EPA's inspector general.

    Mandatory Emissions Reductions

    Jackson's defenders say that she did her best under difficult circumstances. " I think we've gotten a lot done under tough circumstances with a governor who's not pro-environment," says Jeff Tittle, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club.

    Jackson's supporters also note that she served on the board of the nation's first-ever program imposing mandatory reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Under the program, power plants buy and sell allowances giving them the right to pollute, up to a limit, or cap. New Jersey is among the 10 Northeastern states participating.

    The program appears to have loopholes. The Union of Concerned Scientists said in a report last year that the approach "threatens to expand reliance on coal- based electricity elsewhere" because it "puts in price on emissions only from power plants within the region, making electricity from plants outside the region less expensive." The result could be that states import dirtier power from elsewhere.

    Democrats, who have been at odds with the Bush administration's EPA, see a bigger picture. The Obama administration has promised mandatory, nationwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, something the Bush administration steadfastly opposed.

    "I think she's going to be a big improvement over what we have right now," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who caucuses with the Democrats. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said she sees Jackson "moving in a better direction."

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    Siobhan.Hughes@dowjones.com