With the Legislature facing a $2.6 billion budget deficit, Washington environmentalists have a modest agenda for the upcoming session and hope to avoid further cutbacks they say have already devastated environmental protection in the state.

No sweeping measures have been proposed _ in fact, much of the lobbying when the 60-day session starts next week will be to defend what money is still going to environmental programs and to pass measures that didn't make it through the 2009 session.

"From a bill standpoint I don't expect a lot of action except working to protect the funding," says Rep. Dave Upthegrove, D-Des Moines, chairman of the House Ecology & Parks Committee.

The 2009 session, when lawmakers were dealing with a $9 billion revenue shortfall, wasn't kind to any state program. But advocates say environmental efforts were especially hard hit, with natural resources agencies losing 25 percent of their funding.

Natural resources, says Bill Robinson, director of state government relations for The Nature Conservancy, "took the largest budget cut of any of the state functions" _ proportionately, almost two and a half times more than any other area of the budget.

He said many programs that provide the basic science and technology for such things as environmental restoration and wildlife protection were "cut back drastically to the point they're almost nonfunctional."

"We did not have a good session last year," says Clifford Traisman, who lobbies for the Environmental Priorities Coalition, a group of 25 environmental organizations. "We brought forth an agenda this year that we think is consistent with the economic environment we're confronted with."

The coalition has three primary goals:

_Maintain environmental protections and keep spending cuts to a minimum.

_The "Safe Baby Bottles Act," which would phase out the chemical bisphenol from infant food and drink containers and other consumer products. Evidence links the chemical to cancer, miscarriage and other health problems, the coalition says.

_A bill to impose a fee on petroleum products to help pay for cleaning up and preventing stormwater runoff pollution in Puget Sound and other waters. Advocates say it would result in "shovel-ready" projects and new jobs.

Other issues organizations are pushing include reaching a compromise with utilities on what counts as alternative energy sources under Initiative 937, passed by voters several years ago to promote green energy generation, and eliminating tax breaks for the TransAlta coal power plant near Centralia.

None of the proposals made it through the last session.