House and Senate conferees say they have reached a deal on product safety legislation, and they hope to clear the measure this week.

Conferees said Monday they have resolved the last outstanding issues that had mired negotiations, including tighter regulations on certain plastic-softeners.

The House may take up the bill (HR 4040) overhauling the Consumer Product Safety Commission as early as Wednesday, according to a House leadership aide.

Action is less certain in the Senate. “The week is extremely fluid,” a Senate leadership aide said.

Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., one of the key negotiators working on the bill, said the paperwork for the conference report was circulating Monday afternoon.

The agreement combines some of the strongest aspects of the House and Senate versions of the bill, consumer advocates said. For example, rules on lead in products intended for children 12 and younger would be phased in under the House version’s shorter timeline, but would have the Senate version’s lower thresholds: The lead limit would start at 600 parts per million (ppm), effective 180 days after enactment; after three years levels would be capped at 100 ppm.

The Senate deferred to the House in setting the age limit at 12. The Senate’s version would have covered only products designed for children 7 or younger.

Conferees strengthened a Senate provision that called for an online database that would allow people to search consumer-submitted reports of product-related injuries and risks. Detailed screening protocols for the database would help ensure that complaints are valid, as well as allow companies to respond to those complaints online. The database would also include reports from government officials, child care providers, health care providers, coroners, first-responders and the media.

The House version of the bill called for a study on whether to expand the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s complaints database.

Conferees also sparred over toy safety standards. Under the new agreement, the commission would review current widely recognized safety standards set by the nongovernmental ASTM International and adopt them if adequate. If international standards are determined to be inadequate, the commission would write its own.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, pushed hard for language regulating the manufacture of all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), noting that many of his constituents use them as their main source of transportation.

The final report contains a ban on three-wheel ATVs, which generally have not been sold in the United States since the commission and manufacturers reached an agreement on ATV safety standards two decades ago, and a new set of standards for four-wheel ATVs sold in the United States.

“It has been changed to satisfy my needs,” Stevens said.

State attorneys general would be allowed to use their own protocols to enforce the bill. Industry lobbyists had voiced concern that such a provision could lead to 50 different interpretations of federal regulations.

The legislation was introduced in November after a spate of recalls of toys made in China that contained high levels of lead, as well as other hazardous products. The House passed the bill, 407-0, on Dec. 19, and the Senate followed suit March 6, 79-13, after substituting the text of its own version (S 2663), sponsored by Pryor.

One of the most controversial provisions in the Senate’s bill, a restriction on phthalates — a plastic-softener some believe can damage reproductive development — made it into the agreement in modified form. The House version was silent on phthalates.

A major holdout on the phthalates provision, Joe L. Barton of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said conferees “reached a sensible compromise” that “every member of the conference committee can support.”

“Nobody wants our kids to be the guinea pigs in a quest for better living through chemistry, but it’s also imperative that we use unbiased, confirmable science to sort out the real dangers from the mythical ones,” Barton said.

According to House aides, the deal would ban three of the six suspect phthalates for all children’s toys. The other three phthalates would be banned temporarily in products that could be put into a child’s mouth, pending further study and rulemaking.

Conferee Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D‑Minn., said of the phthalates item, “I think it was as good as we could get under these circumstances.”

First posted July 28, 2008 1:08 p.m.