Alliance for Environmental Disaster

F or folks who think President George W. Bush is getting a “bad rap” on his environmental record, a new organization has emerged to set the record straight. Partnership for the West (PFTW) grew out of a late-September Denver summit attended by several elected officials, a number of corporate representatives, and members of several long-standing anti- environmental organizations including the American Land Rights Association, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation. PFTW was formally unveiled on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, DC in late October. 

The organization’s credo, as spelled out on its website, is “Restoring a Common Sense Balance to Economic Growth and Conservation in the West. If you want a clean environment and a healthy, growing economy, and you believe there is no reason why America can’t have both, you belong in the Partnership for the West” (www. partnershipforthewest.org). 

The group plans to work on “restoring a common sense balance to economic growth and conservation in the West.” Claiming to be a grass-roots lobby group, PTFW wants to provide “a counterbalance to what it views as a disproportionate influence of environmental groups like the Sierra Club,” by lobbying in Congress and “pushing an agenda of increased access to public lands for recreation and oil and gas development,” writes Donna Kemp Spangler of the Utah- based Desert Morning News . 

PFTW may be new, but the organization’s key players—Executive Director Jim Sims, Director of Public Policy Holly Propst, Associate Director Paul Poister, and Director of Operations Pam Ortiz —are veterans of the environmental wars and tied to a number of pro-corporate front groups. They run the show at Policy Communications—a well-established and well- connected public relations firm with offices in Golden, Colorado and Washington, DC, where Sims is president, Propst is senior vice president, Poister is a vice president, and Ortiz is director of operations. 

Policy Communications proudly claims that its “principals have more than five decades of combined experience in legislative/regulatory policy development, building and managing broad-based coalitions, and in conducting aggressive lobbying and public relations campaigns.” 

In addition to heading up PFTW and Policy Communcations, Sims was the former director of communications for President George W. Bush’s National Energy Policy Task Force—also known as Cheney’s secret panel—and helped craft the Administration’s energy policy. He also serves as executive director of the Western Business Roundtable (WBR—www.western roundtable.com), an organization that describes itself as “a non-profit business trade association comprised of CEOs and senior executives of organizations doing business in the Western United States.” 

Sims also sits on the board of directors for the Center For The New American Century (www.cnacon line.org), a non-profit think tank based in Denver, chaired by Colorado Governor Bill Owens, which focuses on four issues: Internet taxation (opposes), endangered species reform (supports corporate-government partnerships), civil service reform (opposes “antiquated civil service system”), and civil justice/tort reform (opposes “lawsuit abuse”). 

Sims’s cohorts aren’t chopped liver. According to Policy Communications’ website, Senior Vice President Holly Propst “has spent the last 19 years doing public policy development on energy, environmental and natural resource issues within the U.S. Congress, state legislatures and in corporate environments.” Propst has extensive experience working as a senior staff member in the U.S. House of Representatives and prior to her current position, she was the Manager of Public Policy for Xcel Energy. 

Vice President Paul Poister has 15 years experience in public affairs and corporate communications and has worked with American Medical Response (AMR) in Aurora, Colorado and “spent more than 10 years in Washington, DC, working on Capitol Hill and later for Kasten and Company, a government relations consulting firm.” 

Pam Ortiz, the director of operations, “has more than a decade of experience in the energy industry and came to our company from Xcel Energy, where she worked in the government affairs department.” 

“Generally speaking,” Scott Silver, the executive director of the environmental organization Wild Wilderness (www.wildwilderness. org), wrote in an email exchange, “these people are paid lobbyists and public relations consultants serving the needs of every imaginable sort of polluter, developer, resource extractor or despoiler of the environment. They are not environmentalists by any stretch of the imagination and they have no environmental experience except as active facilitators of environmental destruction employing their skills in the fields of litigation, prestidigitation and conjuring.” 

Policy Communications’ client list reads like a who’s who of the extraction industry, including such corporate citizens as: Tom Brown, Inc., Bill Barrett Corp., Western Gas Resources, Forest Oil, Prima Energy, EnCana, Xcel Energy, Inc., Pfizer, Inc., The Dow Chemical Company, Unocal, Danaher Corporation, Calpine Corporation, ESI Energy, Inc., Constellation Energy, Inc., Oxbow Power Com- pany, Magma Power Company, and Premark International, Inc.”  

Current members of PFTW include more than 100 companies, associations, coalitions, and individuals “who collectively employ or represent hundreds of thousands of people across America in the following sectors: farming/ranching, coal, timber/wood products, small businesses, utilities, hard rock mining, oil & gas, construction, manufacturing, property rights advocates, education proponents, recreational access advocates, county government advocates, local, state and federal elected officials, grassroots advocates and others.” PFTW hopes to attract 100,000 members and raise $5 million for lobbying Congress. 

The organization’s four guiding principles are:

1. Public lands in the West belong to all Americans. We believe these lands should be accessible for sustainable uses and environmentally sound development for the benefit of all Americans.
2. The West needs and deserves good-paying jobs created by sustainable and environmentally sound development. We support public policies that encourage job-creating development, opportunity and prosperity for all. 
3. Consumers in the West and throughout America deserve access to affordable and reliable supplies of the goods, materials, and services that help sustain our quality of life.  We support environmentally sound development of the West’s abundant natural resources in order to sustain and improve America’s quality of life. 
4. We agree to work with citizens across the West in a partnership to support public policies that boost economic growth, create jobs, and encourage environmentally sound development in the West. 

In a recent commentary in the Denver Post , Sims argued that “environmental extremists” are dead- set against “common-sense…effort[s] at better government.”  The result is that “the radical enviro crowd” prefers to “gum up the works as much as possible.” 

PFTW is advocating “common-sense” solutions to environmental problems: that is, eliminating outdated and cumbersome restrictions to enhance domestic energy development and reduce our reliance on foreign sources, greater access to federal lands in the Rockies for oil and natural gas producers, and developing creative public- private partnerships. 

This multi-tiered message comes directly from the playbook of right-wing foundations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and is being re-packaged by spinmeisters at Policy Communications. They’re hoping it’s a winning formula for anti-environmentalists.