Top U.S. Aide Finds Capital’s Environment Lacking : Kevin J. Sweeney Will Leave a Key Dept. of Interior Post to Return to California for a Better Quality of Life

It is the hard-charging, ambitious side of Kevin J. Sweeney that propelled him to run for Congress representing Ventura County and, when that failed, to a dream job as a top aide to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

Once the young environmental activist arrived here in 1993, he wrote speeches and arranged media strategy for Babbitt, planned the secretary’s trips to the vast system of national parks and other public lands run by the Interior Department and helped forge environmental policy in meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

“A dream job? I wouldn’t argue with that,” he said in a recent interview.

But Sweeney’s devotion to the environment, he says, has always been less about blind ambition than hiking in the high Sierra, fly-fishing for trout and living amid nature.

So Sweeney is about to make another change--and he may be returning to Ventura County.

A new husband and father, Sweeney has submitted his resignation as Babbitt’s communications director effective this summer and is planning a return to California--still deciding between the North and the South.

This is not a strategic career move for Sweeney, who has drifted from job to job since he graduated from UC Berkeley in 1980 with a degree in political science.

He worked as a television reporter in Atlanta, was press secretary during Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s failed 1988 presidential bid, waited on tables in a San Francisco bistro and directed the public affairs office for Patagonia Inc., the Ventura-based clothing manufacturer.

It was while he was at Patagonia that Sweeney became the chief strategist of environmental politics in the county. He headed Sierra Now, an amalgam of environmental groups, and was instrumental in blocking the construction of a Cal State University campus on the Taylor Ranch site west of Ventura.

From the nation’s capital, Sweeney is not hopping into a prearranged corporate post or plotting another congressional run. After two years in the pressure cooker of Washington, he says he has no job lined up yet and is moving for a better quality of life.

Last December, Sweeney married a Washington-based journalist, Jennifer Foote, and now has an 8-year-old stepdaughter, Hannah. The couple want their daughter to grow up near her grandparents and cousins in California.

This is not the first time that Sweeney has switched course midstream, putting his personal life before politics.

In the middle of his campaign to unseat Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) in 1992, Sweeney pulled out of the race and said he was moving to Venice Beach with his girlfriend so they could live closer to her work.

“It is clearly not the right time in my life to run for public office,” he said at the time.

But Sweeney had another change of heart and, 11 days later, announced that he was back in the race. To make light of his flip-flop, he sponsored a breakfast fund-raiser in which he flipped pancakes for supporters.

When he later lost to Anita Perez Ferguson in the Democratic primary, Sweeney took to the mountains for a self-imposed retreat aimed at finding himself.

The Washington job came soon afterward, and Sweeney said he has not looked back since.

“I lost. I went fishing. I haven’t looked back,” Sweeney said. “I haven’t spent any time on the Hill looking at offices and thinking about losing.”

Of his two years at the Interior Department, Sweeney said he is most proud of the Administration’s work restoring the Florida Everglades and protecting the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The unforgettable moments have been many, he said.

Recently, for instance, Sweeney accompanied Babbitt to Yellowstone to release wolves into the wild. Sweeney himself carried a crate containing a 110-pound wolf.

“I got to look into its eyes,” he said. “I’ll never forget . . . hearing those wolves howling in Yellowstone.”

But it was the wilds of Washington where Sweeney spent most of his time, and the nation’s capital had a much tougher edge than Ventura ever did.

“The divisiveness here is just overpowering,” Sweeney said. “Not that you expect that this is a country club. But I find it very dehumanizing.”

He points to the new crop of congressional members who came to Washington at the same time President Clinton did, campaigning against the status quo. Eager to bargain with the White House, Sweeney said, the lawmakers turned Congress into “a nest of 535 baby eaglets crying to get fed first.”

Now, with the GOP in control of the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years, environmental policies first proposed during the controversial reign of former Interior Secretary James Watt are re-emerging, Sweeney said. And everyone in the Clinton Administration, Sweeney’s boss included, has been put on the defensive.

In December, for example, Babbitt directed the National Park Service to allow more cruise ships to visit Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park, a move that was seen as a concession to the new Republican majority.

In another instance, Gallegly claimed credit for Babbitt’s move to abolish the Interior Department’s Office of Territorial and International Affairs in January. Before Babbitt acted, Gallegly, the new chairman of the subcommittee overseeing the office, had introduced legislation to eliminate it.

Babbitt, as well, spoke out against a plan floated by some Republicans to unload some Park Service holdings to state or local governments--a proposal that has even scrutinized the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. But in a streamlining of the Interior Department, the secretary proposed transferring three Washington-area parkways from the National Park Service to Maryland and Virginia.

Sweeney said his boss has not abandoned his principles but is simply acknowledging the new political realities in Congress.

“I’m 36 years old, and this is the most critical time for the environment of my life,” Sweeney said. “We’ve had 25 years of progress. . . . The improvements we’ve had have been dramatic. (But) the laws that have guaranteed those successes are in danger of being gutted.”

Still, Sweeney insists that his move is more about his family’s future than the present dynamics on Capitol Hill.

“Where we live matters more than what we do,” Sweeney said. “This town is difficult, but that’s not the reason I’m leaving. I love to fight, but now I’m a dad, and that’s what’s most important to me.”

Just what is next Sweeney does not know.

“I’ve tried presidential politics. I’ve worked in a company. And I’ve done this,” he said. “I will always be an activist, but I’ve always believed in crop rotation--and intellectual crop rotation, as well.”