The gravel-strewn piece of land in the Bayport industrial complex seems unremarkable - just another site for a new chemical plant in the nation's petrochemical capital.

But thanks largely to three Seabrook homemakers' campaign against construction of an acrylic acid facility on the property, the tract now symbolizes a pressing environmental question for the whole Houston region:

How can industrial growth - indeed, any growth that adds new air pollution - continue while the region is striving to comply with federal law and slash its smog levels dramatically in the next few years.

The three women's new environmental group, Clean Air Clear Lake, says the mandate to reduce emissions from plants, cars and other emission sources means that industrial growth, at least, should not proceed for the time being.

In its highest-profile effort yet, the group staged an Austin news conference last week, complete with overtones of presidential politics, to amplify its call for a moratorium on all new state air pollution permits in the Houston region, needed for new industrial construction.

Calling themselves Republican women unhappy with Gov. George W. Bush's environmental record, they called on him to enact such a moratorium - which a Bush spokesman later said he can't legally do. And they released a letter they had sent to President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, Bush's expected presidential opponent, asking them to "right a wrong" and help stop the plant's construction.

The group and allies were scheduled to seek additional publicity for the cause on Saturday with a march to the proposed plant site.

But in sharp contrast to the moratorium plea, the area's top business and government leaders want growth and pollution reduction to occur simultaneously. That view was echoed last week by a key state environmental official.

"The (question) has to be: How can we clean the air, keep it clean, and still grow?" said Jeff Saitas, executive director of the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission.

The TNRCC's professional staff, headed by Saitas, has recommended that the agency's three commissioners grant three crucial emission permits on Wednesday to American Acryl, the company that wants to build the new Bayport plant.

An independent administrative law judge, who presided over a permit hearing, concurred with that recommendation.

TNRCC officials say the permits will require state-of-the-art emission controls, making American Acryl the most tightly controlled of about 50 plants in the Bayport area.

But the three women spearheading the Clean Air Clear Lake group say their neighboring Lakepointe Forest subdivision and other parts of the Clear Lake area are already overburdened with health-threatening air pollution from existing facilities.

"Clear Lake should be a jewel like San Francisco. We're treating it like a toxic dump," said Tamaro Maschino, 41, who has lived in Seabrook for three years.

"The character of our community is going to be changed with more industry," she said. "If we do not stop American Acryl, then more plants will be built, because there is a lot of land out here."

Similar arguments were voiced by some residents last year in an unsuccessful effort to defeat a Harris County bond issue to fund the Port of Houston's new Bayport terminal.

Maschino and the other two opposition leaders, Arlene Polewarczyk, 58, and Lucille Griffith, 64, also Lakepointe Forest residents, have spent the past year disseminating information about the American Acryl plant.

Company officials complain that much of it is actually misinformation, like the suggestion that methyl isocyanate, or MIC, the chemical that killed thousands of people in Bhopal , India, in a 1984 industrial accident, may be used at the plant.

As recently as two weeks ago, an e-mail message from the influential state Sierra Club to the Houston Chronicle alleged that MIC was "one suspected toxic chemical of concern" at the proposed plant.

"We do not have MIC, we will not generate it, we will not use it, we will not emit it," said Jean-Marie Cencetti of the French company Elf Atochem, a partner in the American Acryl venture with Nippon Shokubai, a Japanese company.

TNRCC officials support company officials' blanket denial about MIC.

Jim Blackburn, a prominent Houston environmentalist and attorney who led a coalition battling the Port of Houston's Bayport project, said he found no basis for the idea that MIC may be used by American Acryl when he investigated the plant for residents of the nearby El Jardin subdivision.

Blackburn concluded the proposed port terminal, with its many diesel trucks, would be a bigger pollution "menace" than the chemical plant.

Paul Myers, president of the El Jardin Community Association, said it reached an agreement with American Acryl last year not to contest the company's plans.

"We don't have the money or manpower to stage a two-front war," he said. "The port is the main enemy."

Harris County officials spurned an Elf Atochem request for tax abatements to help build the American Acryl plant in 1997, because county efforts to crack down on environmental problems at other plants run by Elf Atochem were still pending.

At the time, for instance, county officials were still trying to settle an air pollution case against the company's Haden Road plant near Interstate 10 East, which had been a focus of numerous citizen complaints about noxious odors over the years.

County officials decided not to oppose state permits for the American Acryl plant after those issues were resolved and the company agreed to include certain provisions that county officials wanted in the permits, said Cathy Sisk, bureau chief for environmental and community protection in the Harris County Attorney's Office.

Leon Connor, deputy general manager for the American Acryl project, said he doesn't "think Elf Atochem is really proud of that history of the last few years, but they haven't walked away from the problems and their obligation to take corrective action," which has cost "a tremendous amount of money."

Blackburn said he believes some residents' opposition to American Acryl's proposed Bayport plant was also inflamed by the company's decision to keep certain information about chemicals at the plant hidden from the general public in the permit process. State law allows companies to do that in some circumstances to protect trade secrets.

The three Lakepointe Forest women, who gained legal status as formal parties in the permit proceedings, did have access to the "confidential" version of the permit materials reviewed by state experts.

"What we read would curl your hair. We couldn't sleep for days. This company - Elf Atochem - has had so many problems, especially in Texas," Maschino said.

She and the two other women signed a 15-year confidentiality agreement not to discuss the contents of some company records, but she said it was the confidential materials that convinced them to continue their fight.

Company officials have now publicly released a list of what its officials say will be all air pollutants that could be released at the new plant, though not all emission data.

Emission statistics were made public on pollutants that contribute to the Houston region's most prominent air-quality problem - levels of ground-level ozone, a respiratory irritant, which routinely exceed the maximum allowed by the national health standard.

Ozone is smog's chief ingredient, and state officials are working on a plan to eliminate enough ozone-forming pollution, mainly nitrogen oxides, to comply with the health standard by 2007.

The American Acryl records indicate the plant's draft permits would allow up to 0.77 tons of nitrogen oxides to be emitted daily. That's about one-tenth of one percent of the 763-ton reduction the TNRCC calculates will be needed across the entire region to meet the ozone standard.

But state and company officials stress that the plant's permits, in keeping with ozone-reducing rules, will require that 1.3 tons of nitrogen oxides be removed from the air, somewhere in the eight-county region, for every ton emitted at the plant. They say that will occur through American Acryl's purchase of pollution-reduction "credits" from plants in Galveston County and southwest Harris County, which had made reductions of their own nitrogen oxide emissions that were not legally required.

Despite those transactions aimed at a net region-wide reduction in ozone-forming pollutants, no one disputes that the American Acryl plant would add emissions in the vicinity of its own southeast Harris County site - pollutants that form ozone and others that include a variety of toxic substances.

TNRCC officials concluded that, based on computer simulations of projected emissions of such toxic pollutants would not exceed state guidelines, commonly set at one-thousandth of the lowest level known to have any effect on humans.

Because of that finding, "I don't expect this plant would adversely affect the general public, even in the closest neighborhood," said Zarena Post, a TNRCC senior toxicologist.

Even so, the opponents continue to contend that the agency did not adequately assess the plant's potential cumulative impacts on people, in combination with pollution from other industrial facilities.

"We don't need this. If citizens of Clear Lake don't act now, the air is going to get worse," Polewarczyk said.

Texas environmentalists have argued for years that state officials should expand their "cumulative impact assessments" before issuing new air pollution permits.

Without doing that, the Houston area risks violating national health standards for pollutants other than ozone, said Ken Kramer, state Sierra Club director.

Saitas, the TNRCC executive director, said he thinks the state needs to do a better job in making sure emissions from different sources don't add up to produce problems. He thinks the solution lies in much more extensive monitoring of actual pollution levels in the air.

That approach, he said, "can answer the public's very basic questions - is the air safe, is the water clean?"