Farm Bureau Cultivates Clout With Donations

As far as profiles go, the Clark Cowlitz chapter of the state Farm Bureau is subterranean.

It’s not in the phone book. Folks at the local agricultural extension office say they’ve never heard of it. Two checks at the secretary of state’s office turned up nothing. It has no office, and gets its mail at a Vancouver sand mine.

Yet the chapter is a player when it comes to politics, ponying up $10,000 for Referendum 48, the private property rights initiative on the November ballot, state records show.

Welcome to the world of political fund raising, where the official lists of campaign contributors don’t always tell the whole story.

The initiative, passed by the Legislature this year, would require taxpayers to pay property owners for any loss in the value of their property caused by regulations adopted for public benefit.

Voters will decide whether the initiative becomes law. The Farm Bureau is the campaign’s biggest contributor so far, and is coordinating the effort out of its Olympia headquarters.

Farm Bureau chapters around the state have contributed $25,500 so far. The state Farm Bureau also has kicked in $18,500 in cash and $33,957 worth of in-kind contributions.

Besides financial backing, the Farm Bureau name also lends a down-home, grass-roots image to the property rights battle.

But about half the more than 13,000 members of the state organization aren’t farmers at all. They joined to buy insurance, which the organization won’t sell to non-members.

Take the Clark Cowlitz chapter. Only 200 of its 1,200 members are farmers, according to state Farm Bureau records. And most of the $10,000 contribution came from insurance royalties, said Richard Fazio, secretary treasurer for the chapter.

Fazio and his brothers own a sand mine and farm land along the Columbia River the family bought 40 years ago.

The land is zoned for strictly agricultural and wildlife use, which frustrates the Fazio family’s plans to develop it. “That’s why I’m a property rights activist,” Fazio said.

The $10,000 contribution “was the most we could afford to give and we gave it all,” Fazio said of the local Farm Bureau chapter. “This is the most important issue for us there is.”

The Farm Bureau is the country’s biggest farm organization, and a leader in the property rights fight in both Washingtons.

Dean Kleckner, the bureau’s national president, has made property rights a top priority, vowing to defend against “assaults by envirocrats” and “attempts by elitists and their bureaucratic accomplices to dictate how land will be used,” according to published reports.

The organization is solidly conservative, embracing policies at the national level on everything from opposition to gay rights and oneworld government to cutting of aid and citizenship to children of illegal aliens.

Philip Morris Co. Inc., the tobacco giant, was the largest donor to its research foundation last year, based in Park Ridge, Ill.

In Washington state, the Farm Bureau is a political powerhouse, with more registered lobbyists than the Boeing Company, and a $1.5 million annual budget.

About $100,000 was distributed to local Farm Bureau chapters across the state from insurance royalties this year, to spend as they see fit, said Patrick Batts, president of the state Farm Bureau.

Many are spending it on Referendum 48, with eight chapters contributing to the campaign so far.

Meanwhile, timber interests also have given $51,000 to the campaign, including $30,000 from Simpson Timber, $5,000 from Boise Cascade, $10,000 from Washington Contract Loggers and $6,000 from Rayonier Timberlands.

Olympia Master Builders donated $10,000, Masterbuilders of King and Snohomish counties gave $10,000, the Washington Association of Realtors gave $15,000, and the Building Industry Association of Washington kicked in $12,000, state records show.

Despite the support, backers of Referendum 48 trail opponents in fund-raising so far.

Citizens for Property Rights raised $163,968 as of Sept. 12, while The No on 48 campaign pulled in $253,817, records show. No on 48’s big donors are national and statewide environmental groups, labor unions, and preservation interests.

Some of the campaign’s biggest contributors also put up the money, through foundations, to pay for and publicize a study of the initiative’s economic impact.

The study, to be released Thursday, was conducted by professors at the University of Washington, and is being billed as the most “definitive” look at the initiative so far.

Batts said the study can’t be trusted because it was paid for by initiative opponents, and relies in part on information from state agencies and local governments.

“Those are the very groups that are fighting this initiative,” he said. “I’d hardly call it un-biased.”

John Hough of The Rockey Company, which is handling publicity for the study, countered: “You can’t tell academics what to think.”

, DataTimes