Several Tri-City groups are launching an early lobbying campaign that aims to bolster Hanford's fiscal 2000 cleanup budget.

They want to boost the Department of Energy's customary February budget proposal as high as possible to obtain a good position in the annual budget battle before Congress, said Pam Brown, Richland's Hanford analyst.

The groups decided to start now because they fear if they wait until February, the amount already will be pegged too low.

Their targets are the White House and the federal Office of Management and Budget - before it finishes calculating how much the Clinton administration will request for environmental cleanup nationwide.

The Tri-City Industrial Development Council, the Hanford Communities coalition and Hanford labor unions have joined in the campaign.

They have enlisted U.S. Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Slade Gorton, R-Wash., and U.S. Reps. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., and Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said Harold Heacock, TRIDEC's representative on the Hanford Advisory Board.

And the Tri-City groups want to enlist other Northwest interests and other DOE cities, Brown said.

Here's the anticipated evolution of Hanford's cleanup budget for fiscal 2000:

Last spring, OMB gave DOE a tentative nationwide cleanup budget target for fiscal 2000 of about $5.4 billion, about $200 million less than Congress approved for fiscal 1999.

DOE's Richland office figured it should get roughly 20 percent of that $5.4 billion. And in public meetings, DOE's Richland office estimated Hanford would end up $222 million short of what it needs to meet its legal cleanup obligations in 2000.

These preliminary calculations then went to DOE's Washington, D.C., headquarters, which crunched figures that it is not releasing. DOE sent those numbers to OMB in September.

In November, OMB sent revised figures back to DOE in Washington, D.C. These numbers were not shared with DOE field sites. Then DOE headquarters sent its reply back to OMB. DOE officials in Richland declined to comment this week on the latest proposed numbers and the appropriate OMB official could not be reached for comment Friday.

Now, OMB is doing its final calculations to tell DOE how much it can request. DOE will then work out the details to be unveiled in early 1999.

At this point, Tri-City interests want to step in and apply pressure to OMB.

But a basic problem is no one -outside of some inner Washington, D.C., bureaucratic circles -has a firm idea what OMB's current figures are.

"We're operating almost entirely on rumors and suppositions,"Heacock said.

Doug Riggs, a former Hastings aide who now works with a Portland communications firm and is helping the Tri-City effort, said, "It's hard to get factual data." The Tri-City campaign has a handout paper that says the Clinton administration is considering trimming the nationwide cleanup budget from $5.8 billion to $5.5 billion or $5.4 billion.

The $5.8 billion figure is speculative. It is based on taking fiscal 1999's budget of $5.6 bil lion, adding about $94 million in carryover from 1998, and sorting through some rumor and speculation, said Riggs, who came up with the figure. Neither DOE nor OMB provided the figure to Riggs.

Another concern is a separate set of funds - independent of the regular cleanup budget - that is being set aside each year to pay BNFL Inc. to convert Hanford's tank wastes into glass for long-term storage. That contract calls for BNFL not to get paid until it starts producing glass, which is scheduled in 2007.

At that time, the potential annual price tag could be hundreds millions of dollars or more.

So far, DOE has asked Congress for $300 million to $400 million annually to build up a pool to pay BNFL. So far, Congress has drastically slashed those requests each year - setting aside a total of $385 million through 1999.

OMB reportedly is looking at setting a limit of $80 million for DOE's set-aside request for 2000, Riggs said, adding no one has been able to confirm this.