When Sen. Susan Collins meets tomorrow with Stephen Johnson, the president’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, she’s bound to have a long list of questions. Likely to be near the top of her list is a question she and several Senate colleagues have been asking for years: “Where are our documents?” Sen. Collins won’t leave her meeting with the documents, which compare competing air pollution plans, in hand, but it would be reassuring to know that they are forthcoming.

Sen. Thomas Carper, a Democratic member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, is so frustrated by the lack of EPA analysis of the various proposals that he has put a hold on Mr. Johnson’s nomination. “The EPA and other federal agencies have historically provided unbiased scientific information on legislation before Congress,” Sen. Carper said shortly after Mr. Johnson’s confirmation hearings before the committee. “I’ve repeatedly been denied an analysis of my proposal, presumably because the White House is afraid of what it might show.”

Sen. Carper wants scientific reviews of two plans introduced as alternatives to the president’s Clear Skies initiative. The other plans are his bill and the Clean Power Act, which Sen. Jim Jeffords has introduced during the last three sessions of Congress and is co-sponsored by Sens. Collins and Olym-

pia Snowe. Sen. Carper said he would remove the hold if the EPA provided

an “ironclad” guarantee that it would evaluate the other two plans.

It should have done so long ago, and as Sen. Carper asserts, it would have found that the president’s plan is the weakest of the three. An analysis of the three proposals done by an industry coalition found that the Clean Power Act was the strongest legislation, resulting in the greatest reductions in pollution in the shortest period of time. Next was Sen. Carper’s which largely achieved the same pollution reductions as the president’s plan, but did so quicker. The weakest plan was Clear Skies, which died in committee earlier this year.

But the EPA shouldn’t take the power industry’s word for it; the agency should do its own analysis.

Then comes Sen. Collins’ second big question: Why is the EPA backing rules that do less to protect the environment and public health than competing proposals? Specifically, how can the EPA stand by a new mercury pollution rule that the agency’s own inspector general said was crafted backward from an industry-favored standard? The Government Accountability Office said the same rule was based on flawed economic analyses.

The proposed rule, released last month, requires the nation’s 600 coal-fired power plants to cut their total mercury emissions from 48 tons a year to about 38 tons in 2010 and to 15 tons by 2018, a reduction of nearly 70 percent. The Clean Air Act requires power plants to install pollution control technology that would reduce mercury emissions by 90 percent by 2009.

Last year, 45 senators, including Maine’s, asked the EPA to withdraw the proposed mercury rule in favor of the stricter regulations required by the Clean Air Act.

Sen. Collins’ third question may involve changing the name of the agency Mr. Johnson aims to oversee.