N. J. Town, Exxon Gird for Rancorous Annual Meeting

Things are usually pretty quiet in Parsippany, N.J., a town of about 50,000 just 30 miles west of Manhattan. Lately, the hottest news story around has been an attempted kidnaping.

All that is expected to change Thursday, however briefly, when thousands of Exxon shareholders, hundreds of protesters and scores of reporters and photographers descend on the town for the giant oil company’s annual meeting.

Almost two months after the Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground March 24 off Alaska and spewed 11 million gallons of crude oil into the waters of Prince William Sound, Exxon’s management is girding for a potentially rancorous meeting where angry conservation groups and concerned shareholders will gather in the aftermath of the nation’s worst environmental disaster.

Security will be out in force at the meeting site, the Aspen Hotel-Manor. Authorities expect as many as 500 protesters outside the meeting, on top of the 2,400 shareholders who are expected to crowd into the cavernous ballroom and overflow lounge.

Directions to Meeting

New York’s Village Voice newspaper even printed directions to the hard-to-find hotel at the end of a recent article.

“We’re planning as if it will be . . . a major event,” said Dennis P. Dowd, deputy chief of Parsippany’s 116-member police force. “But nobody can commit to size, and that’s a headache.

“Lucky us,” he added.

Representatives of environmental, conservation and consumer groups are slated to show up. Local police will be bolstered by security personnel hired by Exxon and the hotel management.

In fact, some concerned individuals fret that there is a risk the meeting will turn into a sideshow. Shareholders will need tickets for admittance, and lines are expected to form early.

“So many groups are jockeying,” said one representative of Greenpeace U.S.A. “It may turn into a circus.”

Disruptive Protests

Circus or not, Greenpeace, a radical environmental group, plans to be a part of it, sending a handful of representatives who will use donated proxies to gain admittance to the hall. Earth First, another group given to disruptive protests, urged in a recent newsletter that chapter members attend. Consumer activist Ralph Nader’s office is helping to organize volunteers from pension funds, environmental groups and consumer organizations who want to speak out.

Missing will be the Sierra Club, which prefers to seek legislative changes to accomplish environmental goals. “We want to deal with the bigger picture,” said spokeswoman Nancy Light.

Brent Blackwelder, an Exxon stockholder and vice president of the Environmental Policy Institute, a Washington lobbying organization, plans to attend the meeting with a handful of supporters. Together, they will control proxies for more than 70,000 shares.

“We will be demanding of the company much more responsibility,” Blackwelder said. “Exxon has had a real cavalier attitude. They’ve botched the cleanup and lied about it.”

Exxon has claimed repeatedly that it is doing its best and has vowed to complete the cleanup by September. Critics, however, charge that the damage is so extensive that the effects will be evident for years.

Assuming Blackwelder gets the chance to speak up inside the crowded meeting hall, he intends to ask that the company set aside $1 billion a year for five years for an environmental fund.

Whether he gets the opportunity will depend largely on Exxon’s management. The agenda for the meeting listed in the proxy, printed about 10 days before the spill, is limited to such items as votes for directors and various shareholder proposals. Typically, once business is completed, a company’s management opens the floor to discussion, although in this case it’s possible that shareholders will have disrupted the proceedings long before then.

“We have one single, simple objective, to try and run a shareholder meeting that is in the best interests of the shareholders,” said Sarah W. Johnson, an Exxon spokeswoman. “We will run the meeting the way it’s outlined to be run.”

Exxon defused one potential problem last week by bowing to pressure from New York pension funds that the company add a non-employee environmentalist to its board and form a committee of directors to review company policies relating to the environment.

Harrison J. Goldin, the comptroller of New York City and the trustee of the city pension funds, had backed up his requests for changes with a threat to withhold proxy votes for the management’s slate of directors. The funds hold a substantial 6 million Exxon shares, worth about $1 billion. As a result of Exxon’s response, Goldin withdrew his threat to withhold the votes.

California State Controller Gray Davis, a trustee of the California Public Employees Retirement System, which controls 8 million Exxon shares, was deciding if he would continue his opposition to the pension fund’s support for the company.

On a smaller scale, trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund, a $10-billion trust formed with Alaska oil revenues, have voted to withhold their nearly 660,000 votes.

“The trustees just felt that it was inappropriate to vote our shares for Exxon’s management,” said Byron I. Mallott, a fund trustee and chief executive of Sealaska Corp., an Alaska seafood processing company that recently had to forgo herring season because of the spill.

Parsippany won’t be the only place where attention will focus on Exxon.

In Maine, for example, a grass-roots coalition plans a rally in Portland’s Monument Square on Thursday. The group decided against chartering a bus to go to the meeting, choosing instead to alert local residents to what a spill could mean to their own coastal state.

Participants are expected to pour oil “or something symbolic” on a map of Maine and attempt a cleanup, according to Chris Bales, 37, an executive in the solid waste recycling field who helped organize the effort.

Bales got involved at the urging of Ken Adams, a fisherman friend in Alaska.