Waste Panel Nominee No Friend of the Earth, Critics Say : Recycling: Retired can industry executive from O.C. spent years fighting environmentalists. Then Deukmejian appointed him to environmentalist slot.

Nobody involved in the current brouhaha over John E. Gallagher would suggest that the retired can industry executive from Orange is a radical environmentalist.

“I’m not out there driving stakes in redwood trees and chaining myself to rocks on wild rivers,” quipped the 75-year-old former public affairs manager for the Continental Can Corp.

But after years of representing the beverage container industry in its fight against forced deposits on bottles and cans, is he now trying to pass himself off as a misunderstood recycling expert to snare a $90,000-a-year state board appointment?

Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Planning & Conservation League say he is.

The controversy springs from Gov. George Deukmejian’s recent appointment of Gallagher to the environmentalist slot on the new Integrated Waste Management Board, a revamped state agency charged with the formidable task of curbing California’s proliferation of garbage.

They say the appointment is a betrayal by Deukmejian, and they are ready to take on the lame-duck governor by opposing Gallagher when he comes before a Senate committee next month for confirmation.

“There’s no negotiation on this. There’s no gray area,” said Gordon Hart, legislative coordinator for the Sierra Club. “This is a clear example of the governor’s lack of understanding and respect for the environmental movement.”

A Deukmejian spokeswoman, however, said last week that the governor would not withdraw his nomination of Gallagher, who now serves as chairman of the old, embattled Waste Management Board.

She said Deukmejian considers Gallagher’s past efforts to promote voluntary recycling on behalf of the Industry Environmental Council, a loose-knit coalition of beverage container industry representatives, as qualification enough for the environmental slot on the new waste board.

“He’s been literally involved in recycling efforts for decades, and he’s shown his commitment to the promotion of solid waste management and recycling,” said Susan Trowbridge, Deukmejian’s assistant press secretary. “He is a bona fide environmentalist.”

And Gallagher, Orange County’s man in the middle, says he won’t back down either.

“I have over the years of my involvement in environmental issues--with solid waste collection and disposal--learned more and put it into practice more than my adversaries will probably ever learn,” he said Friday from his state office in Fullerton.

The fight brewing over Gallagher’s appointment threatens to reignite the historic animosity between Deukmejian and environmentalists--an ideological conflict that settled into an uneasy truce last year with the creation of the Integrated Waste Management Board.

The new board was created after a growing number of critics accused the old panel of ignoring its legislative mandate: to promote recycling and reduce the 40-million tons of garbage that Californians generate each year. They said the old board concentrated on outdated notions of finding more garbage dumps and building trash incinerators--options unpopular with citizen groups fearing water and air pollution.

The result has been a garbage crisis, according to a Little Hoover Commission report issued last July. Entitled “The Trashing of California,” the government efficiency group warned that the entire state will run out of landfill space by century’s end.

The report scored the old board as “ineffective”--soft on recycling and burdened by the perception that it was dominated by the solid waste industry. The report cited as an example the case of a veteran board member and waste company manager who resigned in May, 1989, after revelations that he repeatedly voted on issues affecting his firm.

Such criticism helped Assemblyman Byron Sher (D-Palo Alto) pass a bill last year revamping the board. His measure also reordered priorities by requiring the new board to slash the state’s proliferation of garbage by 50% in 10 years.

During negotiations on the bill, Deukmejian agreed to give environmentalists a spot on the new six-member board. And in Sher’s writing of the law he prescribed that one of the new board members be someone “who has served as an elected or appointed official of a nonprofit environmental protection organization whose principal purpose is to promote recycling and the protection of air and water quality.”

The idea, Sher said last week, was to appoint “someone who has served in the Sierra Club, the Planning & Conservation League, Californians Against Waste--someone who had worked for laws in promoting conservation.”

Instead, Deukmejian appointed Gallagher, a retired can company executive whom the governor appointed to the old board in 1986.

When the selection was announced June 27, environmentalists expressed shock and disbelief, and protested that they had been double-crossed. One likened the announcement to calling Exxon a coastal conservation group.

“It’s a warping of the language of the statute to say he meets the requirements of this position,” Sher said, adding that it would be a mistake for environmentalists not to fight the appointment.

Gallagher said his detractors are jealous.

“The people who oppose me--God bless it, I understand it--they would like this job, more for getting the job than for what it is going to do for the environment,” he said. “There’s a job here that’s paying $90,000 and they feel that one of their group should have this job.

“I understand how they feel, but if you read the law, it does not name a specific organization that the job should go to,” he said. “It doesn’t say the Sierra Club ought to get it. It doesn’t say that Californians Against Waste ought to have it.”

Gallagher said that he was put in charge of Continental Can’s recycling efforts during World War II and that his interest in resource recovery even prompted him to open a small private recycling operation in a parking lot in San Mateo, where he was living in the early 1970s. He retired from Continental Can in 1979.

The center took in cans, glass, cardboard and newspaper; in return, it handed out Blue Chip stamps which could be traded in for catalogue items, Gallagher said. Problems with thieves eventually forced him to abandon the enterprise, he said.

“As a matter of fact, they robbed me blind,” he said. “They kept breaking into our shack and stealing my Blue Chip stamps.”

But Deukmejian’s spokeswoman said it was Gallagher’s involvement with the Industry Environmental Council from 1970 to 1982 that qualified him as having belonged to a nonprofit environmental organization.

In a recently drafted resume, Gallagher identified himself as a “founder” of the IEC and said it was created in the early 1970s as “one of the first groups in California” to push for recycling as an alternative to landfills.

Unreported in the description, however, and what has environmentalists howling the loudest, is that Gallagher and his IEC helped direct the beverage container industry against early attempts by recycling advocates to pass mandatory deposits on cans and bottles.

“I saw him at every single hearing, rallying his troops against it,” said Matt Kuzins, who spearheaded environmentalist efforts for mandatory deposits in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “As far as I can tell, testifying against the bottle bill was the only thing the Environmental Council ever did. I never saw them testify for or against any other legislation or advocate any other program in California.”

As chairman of the IEC, Gallagher wrote a 1977 opinion piece for The Times opposing a bottle bill. He argued that Oregon’s landmark 1972 deposit law, hailed by environmentalists as a nationwide model, actually produced “considerable dislocation” of the economy, in part because industry had to spend up to $8.5 million for new equipment and technology.

And when environmentalists, frustrated by the beverage container industry’s power in the Legislature, were able to get a nickel-deposit initiative on the 1982 ballot, records show that Gallagher led a $5.7-million campaign against the measure, which lost.

Campaign records show that Gallagher was paid nearly $10,000 and was listed as agent for the campaign, run by a group that called itself “Californians for Sensible Laws.” His former employer, Continental Can, gave $88,514 to the campaign and the Can Manufacturers Institute gave $528,225.

Even after the five-cent deposit initiative failed, Gallagher continued to square off against environmentalists over scaled-down versions of the bottle bill. Appearing on behalf of the IEC, Gallagher called two such proposals “anti-free enterprise, anti-voluntary recycling, anti-labor and, most important, anti-consumer,” during a 1984 Senate committee hearing.

Sierra Club members say that it was only after Gallagher left the IEC that the industry group agreed to work with environmentalists in 1986 to pass the current bottle bill, which requires a deposit of five cents for two cans.

Gallagher said his detractors have failed to separate the issues: The fact that he opposed mandatory deposits doesn’t dull his enthusiasm for voluntary recycling. He said his record not only includes other industry-connected efforts, but also shows high marks for the way he has redirected the old waste management board after being named its chairman last year.

Gallagher also said he is very proud of a 1976 legislative resolution extoling his “capable, unselfish and effective service” with the IEC and praising “his efforts to further the cause of resource recovery and environmentally and economically sound solid waste management practices” in California.

As it happens, that resolution was issued by the Senate Rules Committee--the same panel that environmentalists will address Aug. 15 to argue that Gallagher is unfit to fill the waste board’s environmentalist slot.

“I’ll be working as hard as I can to convince the members of the Rules Committee that, in the 1970s, they gave me quite a commendation for the things that we’re talking about--recycling and resource recovery,” Gallagher said. “I could only have gotten better with more years under my belt.”

But environmentalists say it is a matter of principle that they fight the appointment.

“It’s too clear that he’s a former industry lobbyist and doesn’t even have the veneer of being an environmentalist,” said Corey Brown, general counsel for the Planning & Conservation League. “I think the governor wants to protect the solid waste industry he’s been close to for decades, even if it is to blatantly violate the letter of the law.”