By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Gary H. Baise calls himself "one of the original environmentalists," a reference to his role in the creation of the EPA and the 700-acre corn and soybean farm he still owns in his native southern Illinois.
"If I don't protect the land, my livelihood washes away," said Baise, 66, a Washington lawyer and Republican candidate who is challenging incumbent Gerald E. Connolly (D) for chairmanship of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in the Nov. 6 election.
Baise served as chief of staff to the Environmental Protection Agency's founding administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, in the early 1970s. He is on the board of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, a nonprofit group that tries to forge partnerships between business and government. He is a member of a federal task force looking at ways to reduce agricultural air pollution. Instead of driving from his Falls Church home, he takes the Metro to the 14th Street NW offices of his firm, Kilpatrick Stockton.
Yet for most of the past 30 years, when a corporation, a local government, a developer or a farmer has landed in a dispute with environmental regulators, Baise is often whom they have called.
He has built a lucrative career as a courtroom advocate for cities whose sewage systems have fouled rivers, wheat and grass farmers seeking to burn their stubble and chemical companies vouching for the safety of their products.
In the early 1980s, Baise represented the state of New York in its effort to build a six-lane underground highway along the West Side of Manhattan.
A federal judge concluded in 1985 that the project, known as Westway, would have destroyed vital fish habitats in the Hudson River. U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Griesa said in his decision that state officials gave misleading testimony on the potential environmental impact of the $5 billion project.
Baise had earlier drafted a 16-page memo for Westway arguing that land-filling of the Hudson would do no harm because the region was nearly devoid of aquatic life -- despite updated data showing striped bass habitats.
Griesa had said in an earlier opinion that state and federal highway officials acted in "willful derogation" of the law by failing to come forward with the new habitat studies. He also excoriated Baise and his law firm at the time, Beveridge and Diamond, for setting forth "a statement of facts which was so divorced from the truth."
"He was dead wrong," Baise said during an interview last week about his legal career. He described Griesa as "an attorney who came out of a securities law practice" who had little understanding of environmental matters. He was merely advising his clients on how to present their case most effectively. "We were trying to figure out how to best present the story."
The debate over Westway ended more than 25 years ago, and although Baise doesn't mention the project to Fairfax audiences, it resonates in his campaign message. New York, he said, would be better off had the highway been built -- just as Fairfax would benefit from more roads to alleviate congestion.
Baise asserts that Connolly's focus on mass transit -- principally the Metro extension to Dulles International Airport -- has diverted critical attention and resources from that priority.
"We've got to have more roads and look at roads in a smarter way," said Baise, who added that he supports an additional westbound lane for Interstate 66 and widening Route 7.
Connolly's supporters say he has pushed hard for road improvements, including widening West Ox and Chain Bridge roads. He also campaigned for voter approval of the 2004 transportation bond package and for the $300 million program passed early this year by the General Assembly that will underwrite road work.
Legal opponents praise Baise for his professionalism and personable style -- one called him "a Southern gentleman" -- but they say Westway is just one of many reasons he is no environmentalist.
"Gary has a reputation for being the go-to guy for polluters who want to continue finding ways to pollute," said Spokane public interest lawyer Karen Linholdt, who represented a group of doctors and patients who said their respiratory problems were aggravated by massive burning of wheat and grass stubble in Idaho and Washington state.
Baise, representing the National Association of Wheat Growers, argued that the farmers' actions were well within the boundaries of the Clean Air Act. Much of the burning has been rolled back by a series of court rulings, but some matters are still pending.
Baise has also denounced his former agency as "a bastion of environmental extremism" that uses its muscle against relatively powerless farmers and other small-business people.
As an honorary board member of the nonprofit Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, Baise has promoted opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil exploration.
Connolly has jumped on Baise's association with CREA, raising questions about his judgment and ability to exercise oversight.
CREA's co-founder, Italia Federici, pleaded guilty this year to lying to a Senate committee investigating lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Federici had a personal relationship with J. Steven Griles, a coal industry lobbyist and deputy interior secretary during President Bush's first term. Griles also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in 2005 about his relationship with Abramoff. It was Federici who introduced Griles to Abramoff, and it was CREA that received $500,000 from Abramoff's clients, which included Native American tribes and energy and mining interests.
"Mr. Baise has spent a career protecting dirty industry under the guise of environmental law," Connolly said earlier this year. "His association with CREA and the Abramoff scandal ought to be troubling to all of us in the community."
Baise, who was not a subject of the investigation, said that he had "not a clue" about Federici's connections and that he never met Abramoff, now serving a prison sentence. He said his honorary status meant that he did not have the kind of responsibilities he would have carried as a regular board member.
Fairfax environmental groups rendered their judgment last week on Baise's record. The Fairfax County League of Conservation Voters, the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club and the Clean Water Action Project endorsed Connolly for his leadership of the board on storm-water management, transit-oriented development and the Cool Counties initiative, an attempt to develop strategies against global warming.
George Lamb, president of the Fairfax League of Conservation Voters, said Baise rebuffed multiple requests to answer the group's candidate questionnaire.
Baise said he hasn't filled out any candidate questionnaires, calling them "self-serving." He said criticism from Connolly and environmental groups discounts a generation's worth of strides.
When he and Ruckelshaus "came into power, lakes and rivers were burning, for God's sakes. We've had enormous progress," Baise said. "We are all polluters," he added, calling his years of environmental litigation a search for a responsible balance between commerce and public health.
"If you want to have zero discharges, you shut this country down," he said.
Baise is currently fighting an EPA proposal to phase out the use of liquid carbofuran, an agricultural insecticide made by one of his clients, FMC. The government, which banned the granular form of the product several years ago, says that carbofuran, which is used by corn, cotton and alfalfa farmers to control rootworm and weevils, is deadly to birds. Baise says it is an example of regulatory excess.
"More birds are killed by cats than by carbofuran," he said.
Baise has also faced off with the EPA on wetlands, an area of enforcement he regards as the epicenter of EPA's zealotry. In the mid-1980s, he represented a company planning a shopping mall on 82 acres in South Attleboro, Mass., that encompassed 50 acres of wetlands known as Sweedens Swamp.
The EPA vetoed the Army Corps of Engineers' approval of the plan because the developer had alternative sites available at the time it entered the market to search for land. The courts sided with the EPA.
If elected, Baise said, he would bring an aggressive environmental agenda to Fairfax. Since becoming a candidate, he said, he has received reports that the county has a serious problem regulating construction site runoff. He said he would push for better protection of the Chesapeake watershed. He also promised a hard look at the size of the county's fleet of more than 1,100 vehicles.
Last year, The Washington Post reported that county employees were running up the odometers on government cars to meet the annual minimum mileage required to retain those vehicles.
"Fairfax County," Baise said, "is probably one of the biggest polluters around here."
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