Defenders Magazine

A Big Business Agenda

Industry leaders have an inside track to state lawmakers — to the detriment of the environment.

by Bill Hogan

Several hundred state legislators from around the country gathered in Washington, D.C., in December for a three-day conference that, from all outward appearances, pretty much resembled any other professional meeting. The conference, organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and promoted as the “States and Nation Policy Summit,” was designed, according to a brochure for the event, to give the lawmakers an opportunity to “share their knowledge and experiences with each other, as well as hear from national leaders and renowned policy experts.”

The scene will be repeated in August, on a much larger and grander scale, when more than a thousand state legislators from around the country gather in Orlando, Florida, for ALEC’s 29th annual meeting. ALEC calls its five-day annual meeting “one of the nation’s most prestigious state-level conferences,” describing it as an opportunity for state legislators “to discuss issues and develop policy.” Unmentioned is the fact that the lawmakers will be outnumbered, as they are at nearly all ALEC meetings, by legions of lobbyists, corporate executives, and representatives of trade and professional associations who pay for the privilege of having them as their captive audience.

Indeed, ALEC’s annual meetings and other high-profile get-togethers tend to be mostly window dressing for a panoply of policy decisions made either within the organization’s offices in Washington, D.C., or in closed-door consultations with the corporations and other interests that finance virtually all its activities. The tie that binds is money, and the roster of ALEC’s biggest underwriters leaves little doubt as to what the organization is all about: American Express Company, BellSouth Corporation, the Chlorine Chemistry Council, Coors Brewing Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Golden Rule Insurance Company, Intuit, Koch Industries, Nationwide Insurance, PG&E National Energy Group, Pfizer, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, Philip Morris Management Corporation, Procter & Gamble Company, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Seagram/North America, United Parcel Service and Verizon Communications.

In truth, ALEC is a tax-exempt organization set up to help hundreds of big corporations and trade associations advance their legislative agendas in state capitals from coast to coast. In virtually all of its promotional materials, ALEC calls itself “the nation’s largest bipartisan, individual membership association of state legislators.” This description, however, is misleading in almost every way.

For starters, although ALEC is open to members of both parties, it is only nominally “bipartisan.” It declines to make its membership list public, but one of its current publications lists 209 members who are in “senior leadership positions” (including its own state chairmen) in the 50 state legislatures. The publication doesn’t list the party affiliations of the state legislators, but the breakdown is lopsided: 177 percent are Republicans (84 percent), 29 are Democrats (14 percent), and the remaining three, from Nebraska, are officially classified as “non-partisan.” Only three of ALEC’s state chairmen — in Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas — are Democrats. Six members of ALEC’s board of directors are Republicans, and just one is a Democrat.

What’s more, ALEC isn’t really a membership association of state legislators. Dues for lawmakers are just $25 a year. ALEC’s tax return for 2000 shows that it collected a total of $56,126 in “membership dues and assessments” that year – less than one percent of its total revenues of nearly $5.7 million. ALEC reportedly has more than 300 corporate sponsors that pay annual membership fees ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 to be part of the action. ALEC’s dues structure seems designed mainly to boost its total membership numbers and help it maintain its thin but seemingly durable façade as a voluntary association of state legislators — an organization on a par with, say, the National Conference of State Legislatures or the National Governors Association.

The organization’s multi-million-dollar annual budget is lavished on the state legislators who choose to join — about 2,400 in all, by ALEC’s count. ALEC’s “legislator members” can avail themselves of perks that include taxpayer-financed junkets to prime tourist destinations in the United States, free or heavily subsidized vacations for their spouses and children, and an assortment of other fringe benefits that range from no-cost child care and medical tests to free Broadway theater tickets and dinners at expensive restaurants. For many, it’s an irresistible temptation. Most can even pass along the nominal membership fee to taxpayers in their states.

Each December, ALEC invites newly elected state legislators to its meeting in Washington. The purpose of the conference is to bring them into ALEC’s fold and introduce them to the many perks of membership. The meeting, which in previous years ALEC has more accurately billed as a “National Orientation Conference,” is just one of many events at which its “legislator members” can get to know the organization’s “private-sector members.”

For additional fees of $1,500 to $5,000 a year, ALEC’s “private-sector members” can buy a seat — and a vote — on one or more of its nine task forces, which cover territory ranging from civil-justice to trade and transportation issues. In this way they can draft exactly the legislation they want, have it rubber-stamped by ALEC’s membership and, in most cases, arrange to have the legislation introduced in a host of state legislatures by sympathetic lawmakers. “Legislators welcome their private-sector counterparts to the table as equals,” an ALEC publication notes, “working in unison to solve the challenges facing the nation.”

By nearly any standard, ALEC’s “private-sector members” get a big bang for their bucks. Through ALEC, they can have legislation written by their lawyers and lobbyists circulated among the organization’s membership, approved by its task forces and board of directors, and then introduced in dozens of state legislatures. ALEC’s “model” bills and packets of background information frequently shape the discussion on key issues in state legislatures.

ALEC claims that its member legislators introduced more than 3,100 pieces of legislation during the 1999-2000 legislative cycle and that more than 450 of them were enacted. Virtually all of the bills bear benign-sounding names that obfuscate the various corporate interests behind them.

In the past decade, ALEC and its member corporations and trade associations have mounted a wide-ranging — and surprisingly effective — assault on state and federal environmental-protection laws. For example, ALEC’s inventory of “model” legislation includes such measures as “The Environmental Good Samaritan Act,” the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act,” the “Groundwater Protection Act” and “The Private Property Protection Act.” All these measures have emanated from ALEC’s Task Force on Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture, which clearly has been charged with advancing industry agendas. “The best chance we have to improve the environment,” the task force’s staff director said on Earth Day 1998, “is to break the stranglehold of the command-and-control policies promoted by the EPA and the extremist environmental lobby.”

The task force pushes more than two dozen pieces of “model” legislation on its members – everything from resolutions on biotechnology and environmental justice to bills like the “Common Sense Scientific and Technical Evidence Act” and the “Waste Tire Abatement Act.” Typically, the task force’s private-sector members write the legislation that’s placed on the table for discussion. The legislative and corporate members, sitting elbow-to- elbow around a big table, vote separately on each measure. A majority on both sides is needed to approve “model” legislation. Consequently, the private-sector members have effective veto power over the task force’s activities and legislative recommendations. Nothing can move out of the task force without an affirmative vote of its private-sector members.

ALEC’s “Economic Impact Statement Act” is a telling example of its approach to environment-related legislation. It would require state agencies to produce detailed “economic impact statements” for all existing and proposed environmental regulations. ALEC says that the draft legislation has been designed “to provide environmental protection while permitting the creating of wealth through requiring an economic analysis of new environmental regulations.”

In truth, though, the proposed legislation is little more than a get-even inversion of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates environmental impact statements for federal projects. Environmental activists have long used the landmark federal law to halt or delay potentially destructive projects; now, through ALEC’s “model” legislation, corporations aim to turn the tables at the state level.

Although ALEC says that its self-described mission is to “advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty among America’s state legislators,” here’s a case where it conveniently puts aside its principles: Agencies or other arms of state governments, after all, would have to generate all those economic impact statements required under its “model” legislation. The New Mexico Fish and Game Department has estimated, for example, that it would need 20 additional employees, at a cost of $1.5 million a year, to get the job done.

Then there’s ALEC’s “Environmental Audit Privilege and Qualified Disclosure Act,” which opponents in some states have branded the “Polluter Protection Act.” This proposed law limits the public’s right to know about environmental, workplace and industrial hazards, allowing companies to keep secret the results of environmental audits on the pollution they are emitting.

And consider this final case in point: ALEC’s “Private Property Protection Act,” an initiative that ultimately could lead to the dismantling of such watershed environmental- protection laws as the 1972 Clean Water Act, the 1973 Endangered Species Act and the 1990 Clean Air Act. This piece of “model” legislation grew out of an ALEC resolution that expressed the organization’s opposition to “any governmental attempt at whatever level and by whatever means to confiscate, reduce the value of, or restrict the uses of private property unless to abate a public affecting the public health and safety.”

When most people think of the Fifth Amendment, they think of the clause that confers on individuals the right not to incriminate themselves. But the Fifth Amendment also holds that “No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” Accordingly, when government condemns land for a highway or commercial airport, it must pay the owner fair market value for his or her lost property.

Over the past decade, however, property owners, real-estate developers, and others pushed a radical reinterpretation of the Fifth Amendment as part of a wide-ranging drive to eviscerate a generation of environmental-protection laws and land-use reforms. They argue that any government action — a new zoning law or wetlands regulation, for example, or the adoption of a wildlife habitat preservation plan — may constitute a “taking” of property value for which a property owner must be compensated.

ALEC’s bill would require that the government financially compensate property owners for any federal regulation that reduces the value of a business or property by a mere 10 percent or more. But environmentalists argue that proposals such as this tend to focus on immediate losses to individual landowners and to grossly underestimate the future value of such regulations, such as long-term protection of a watershed. The bill’s most immediate impact would almost certainly be to overwhelm and bankrupt federal agencies with claims, which would quickly put untenable political pressure on environmental and other laws designed to protect the public good.

In California, State Senator Raymond Haynes, a Republican, has sponsored a veritable slew of ALEC-written “Private Property Bills” over the years. Haynes, who recently completed a term as ALEC’s national chairman, has been amply rewarded for his dedication to the organization. He’s been on the receiving end of numerous ALEC-paid trips, including a 10-day junket to Australia in 1998 that included three days on the shores of the Great Barrier Reef, where, Haynes later admitted to The Orange County Register, little work was conducted. The purpose of the trip, Haynes said, was to set up an Australian version of ALEC.

While on the trip, Haynes found himself staying in a luxury hotel that was so expensive he called ALEC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., to make sure that it was picking up the tab, which came to $1,600 for six nights. “It was not a place I would have picked, but they picked it,” Haynes told a reporter for The Orange County Register. “So I didn’t squawk all that much.”

Far from squawking, in fact, many of ALEC’s “legislator members” are ready, willing, and able to carry water, whenever needed, for the organization’s corporate underwriters. Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, for example, ALEC happily served as one of the tobacco industry’s most dependable foot-soldiers on issues big and small. Internal ALEC documents obtained from the vast document repositories set up by the nation’s tobacco companies as part of the industry’s settlement with the state attorneys general paint a stark portrait of exactly how corporations achieve their lobbying objectives through ALEC, even when no state issues are involved. Consider this excerpt from a letter, dated October 6, 1993, and printed on ALEC letterhead, from State Representative Dale Van Vyven of Ohio to more than 50 of his colleagues in the state legislature: “The free enterprise system, the ‘First Amendment,’ and the ‘Joe Camel’ ads of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company are all under attack by special interest organizations and an ad hoc group of state attorneys general, including our own. As a consequence, our friends at RJR need your help and that of other ALEC members in Ohio in opposition to a proposed Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ban against the ‘Joe Camel’ advertising campaign.”

Van Vyven didn’t get his way, and Joe Camel is long gone, but who doubts that ALEC still jumps just as high when another corporate sponsor beckons?

Bill Hogan is a Washington, D.C., writer.