A group representing state environmental officials says California, Colorado, Alabama, Ohio and about a dozen other states have been pressured by the Pentagon to back off the oversight of cleanup at polluted military sites.

“In the worst-case scenarios, the Department of Defense is intimidating a state environmental agency into not pursing enforcement,” said Steve Brown, executive director of the Environmental Council of States. The disclosures came during a Senate hearing yesterday on the Pentagon’s refusal to follow final orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up three military bases: Fort Meade in Maryland, Fort McGuire in New Jersey and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.

Congress gives the Pentagon about $30 million annually to dispense to states with contaminated military bases, to help pay the states’ costs to oversee cleanup of those sites.

But in 2006, the Pentagon began telling some states they would no longer receive money for various oversight activities and would lose all of the money if they took enforcement action. Alabama, for example, ordered the Army to clean up a former chemical weapons school, Camp Sibert, after a study ranked it worst in the nation among old military sites for the hazard of unexploded weapons.