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By Charles A. Bedell, Secretary, LHI
1998
In the first installment of "The Hidden Empire", we told the story of how the Sierra Club has established a method for enriching itself at the expense of industry and the taxpayers. Another facet of the Sierra Club' scheme to support it's political programs by helping itself to local, state and federal tax dollars has come to light in recent case, United States v. San Diego, No. Civ. 88-1101-B POR ( S.D. Cal. June 30, 1998 ). In that case, Judge Rudi M. Brewster generously awarded the Sierra Club $781,306 of local and federal tax money to pay for "legal fees", which specifically included amounts spent lobbying Congress!
In the 1980's, the U.S. EPA and the State of California worked with the City of San Diego to help correct problems which had lead to repeated violations of the Clean Water Act. We do not know how serious these violations were or how many different sorts of problems had to be worked out, but in the end the EPA and the State worked out a consent decree which they felt would rectify the situation. It was at this point that the Sierra Club found its opportunity to second guess the government enforcement
agencies and grab some cold, hard cash to help finance its on-going lobbying effort to push its amendments to and for passage of the Ocean Pollution Reduction Act of 1990 back in Washington, D.C.!
The Sierra Club had long been lobbying Congress to "toughen" the Clean Water Act. You can imagine their delight when a case all the way across the country presented them with a "Bully Pulpit" to advocate their political agenda while also providing a way to underwrite their continuing lobbying effort to change the law! Rushing to the court house, the Sierra Club lawyers intervened to oppose the consent decree as inadequate, despite the fact that, among other things, it would have required the City to meet water treatment standards by building several new sewage treatment and water reclamation facilities. Among the things the Sierra Club objected to was that part of the treatment of the City's waste water would have involved the use of chlorine, a chemical which the Club and other radical groups had been trying to ban from manufacture and use all over the country. Since the Club has a consistent record of stirring up political opposition to cities' growth and facility development, it's legal intervention advocated the use of what it called "innovative new technology", mandatory water conservation restrictions on the citizens of San Diego and a water reclamation project rather than the building one of the proposed new sewage treatment facilities.
At the same time it trying to stop the consent decree, the Sierra Club's lobbyists were busy in Washington, D.C. Lobbyists representing local governments around the country had been hard at work trying to get Congress to cut them a special deal which would allow cities to get waivers of some requirements under the law.
After passage of the new law, the EPA and the State agreed to allow the City to refrain from building one of the sewage treatment plants. The Sierra Club filed to recover its "legal fees" which were strenuously opposed by the City of San Diego, but, apparently, ( Are you surprised? ) not objected to by the State of the EPA! Generous Judge Brewster, however, dipped into the pockets of the City's taxpayers and allowed the Sierra Club to have both fees for its lawyers' direct efforts in the EPA's administrative proceedings and for what the Judge called lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., which he said were " essential to reaching a viable settlement" and which were undertaken to "protect interests that are intimately related" to the case at bar. This decision is even stranger when one reads that the Judge correctly refused to pay the Sierra Club lawyers for time they spent in proceedings before the Regional Water Quality Control Board because he felt that work was done for what he called "general purposes" which were "not essential to the outcome of this case."
Judge Brewster did this despite the following facts:
1. the Club's lobbying efforts were only a small part of the overall lobbying effort on the particular amendment which allowed the city to seek its waiver,
2. the EPA and the City could and would have invoked the provision of
law which created the waiver on their own if the law had existed in 1989 as
it did in 1990 without the Sierra Club's intervention,
3. the Sierra Club's lobbying had been going on before the Sierra Club's
intervention in the case and "benefitted" cities all around the country.
Judge Brewster felt the Club's lobbying in Washington was related to the outcome of this case because it was one of the parties the winning side. The Judge gave great weight to the Club's assertion that it's backing of a relaxation of the Clean Water Act designed to benefit cities played a key role in the passage of the particular legislative language which was used in part of the overall solution to the Federal and State governments' original civil suit. But should that be enough to take the potentially dangerous step of forcing the public to pay for political lobbying activities of a special interest group? Hopefully, the Judge didn't make the people of San Diego pay for all the Sierra Club's years of lobbying on the Clean Water Act. Is it any wonder that the Courts are not held in the high esteem the should be when one sees another instance where the Courts are being used to line the pockets of the environmental advocacy, special interest industry?
It will be interesting to see if the Sierra Club and other activists try to get paid again in other cities in other cases involving this same change in the law. "If you lobby and win in Washington, you get paid by local taxpayers" seems like a very dangerous precedent for any Court to set.
The Sierra Club and other activist groups consider themselves superior to the democratically-elected government and its agencies which the People, the law and the Constitution put in charge of administering public policy and enforcing the law in the United States. Now it seems clear that these private citizens, these self-anointed saviors, feel that have a right to be paid from your tax dollars for seeking to achieve their elitist political goals! They don't put it on the line and run for office; they prefer to manipulate things from behind the scenes. History teaches those who love Democracy to beware of quasi-religious, political movements which demonize those who disagree with them and conspire to wield the power of government by conferring on themselves the power that in America can only be conferred directly by the People.
If you read "Inside the Hidden Empire: Part Four" in the last two issues of the Lincoln Log, you will see another reason why the Sierra Club was working so hard in Congress to give the cities a special exemption to the Clean Water Act and why the EPA did not oppose this latest Sierra Club's raid on the Treasury! They don't want ordinary citizens to get upset because local taxes have to be raised to pay for their ever-expanding web of environmental regulations . . . . and for the Sierra Club's lawyers!
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