Forest Plan Shows Turnabout In Lobbying Influence Industry Language Clear In Craig’s Plan, But Environmentalists Have Done Same

Sen. Larry Craig’s bid to change the way America’s forests are managed has showcased an ethical debate over the role of lobbyists.

At the heart of the debate is the claim that Craig’s legislation contains 23 of 28 industry proposals outlined by a timber lobbyist last year.

But the conservation lawyer complaining about industry’s influence has been helping write U.S. environmental laws for years, a timber lobbyist says.

“When you point at somebody else, you ought to be clean to complain,” said Frank Gladics, vice president of the Western Forest Industries Association in Portland. “All through the last Congress, they (conservationists) continually bitched about resource-based industries being too close to Congress. And yet they have been equally close to Congress prior to that and are probably equally close to the administration now.”

Gladics complained specifically about Kevin Kirchner, a lawyer, lobbyist and former congressional aide who is vice president of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

Kirchner drew industry’s ire last month by including a chart in his testimony before a congressional committee showing Craig, an Idaho Republican, relying on industry proposals.

“In some cases, they use exactly the same language,” Kirchner said, pointing to proposed changes he says would accelerate logging on national forests.

Gladics said Kirchner has done the same thing in the past, drafting language for congressional committee staff to insert into bills during negotiations over compromises.

Gladics said he watched Kirchner and other environmental lawyers review and rewrite language for spending bills in 1991 and 1992 outside the House Appropriations interior subcommittee room. Forest-protection bills offered in recent years by former Reps. Jim Jontz, D-Ind., and John Bryant, D-Texas, were written almost entirely by environmental lobbyists, he said.

“They seem to be saying that they are the only ones who can lobby in Washington, D.C.,” Gladics said. “I think everybody should be able to.”

Kirchner contends there’s a big difference between the goals of his group and Gladics’ organization.

“When we participate in the process, we are trying to protect public resources. When the industry does it, they are trying to profit from public resources,” Kirchner said. “It is interesting, he is not denying the industry had a role in writing the legislation.”

Among other things, Craig’s draft legislation would place new limits on citizen appeals of national-forest logging. It would also give the Forest Service more freedom to carry out logging without the backing of other agencies, such as the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Environmentalists hope to derail the proposal. They say it is an attempt to make permanent the kinds of changes Craig and others got through Congress two years ago in legislation that exempted emergency salvage logging from environmental safeguards.

They say Craig and others are attempting to make the language of the salvage logging rider permanent. That rider, part of an appropriations bill signed by President Clinton, exempted salvage logging from appeals and from all environmental legislation. It expired Jan. 1.

Gladics wrote to Craig last week complaining about the double standard he believes Kirchner is applying to the industry’s lobbying tactics. He included copies of old billing records in which Kirchner listed meetings with congressional staff.

“Having been in Washington, D.C., for four years and watching Mr. Kirchner and other environmentalists carry out the same type activities that he is complaining about, I thought you might be interested in the attached documents,” Gladics wrote.

Craig, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on forests, had no immediate comment on Gladics’ request for scrutiny of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund’s activities, a committee aide said.

However, the senator did write organization president Vic Sher in San Francisco last month, complaining that the group had not expressed any views on his proposed legislation except to characterize it as industry’s work.

“Your ad hominem assertion that my legislation simply represents a timber industry wish-list wasn’t particularly helpful,” Craig wrote.

“On a more general note, I’m disturbed by statements in the popular media offered by Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund lobbyist, Kevin Kirchner, that it’s somehow improper for Congress to take advantage of any good ideas offered by the forest products industry (or, presumably, other groups that might disagree with the SCLDF)’,” he said.

An aide to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said Craig is unlikely to press the matter further. There was no reference to it when Kirchner appeared before Craig on Feb. 28 as a member of a panel discussing Craig’s draft legislation.

“Generally, there is nothing terribly surprising in the hourly accounting of the lobbying activities,” said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“It seems to me, those are the kinds of things lobbyists do and have been doing for a long time. They’ve done it in Democratic and Republican congresses alike.”

, DataTimes