LITIGATION : Sagebrush Lawyer Reins In the Feds : Legal foundation chief helps lead the West’s battle for more property rights, less regulation.

It was during a snowstorm on a desolate Wyoming highway in the late 1950s when Perry Pendley first remembers the long arm of the federal government trying to interfere in the lives of everyday people.

Riding with his father in a pickup truck, Pendley heard a radio news broadcast about a proposal that would have required uniform white striping on the nation’s roadways.

As they looked into the blizzard, Pendley said, they realized that the contrasting yellow stripes on the pavement were the only things keeping them on the road.

“I thought it was crazy that these bureaucrats were telling us to do something they didn’t know anything about,” Pendley said. “And, I wondered, should federal officials be making those kinds of decisions?”

Now, after experience in Washington as an assistant Interior secretary during the Ronald Reagan Administration, the president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation is challenging federal intrusions of every stripe on the lives and businesses of the nation’s farmers, ranchers, miners, lumbermen and contractors--and trying to ensure the development of natural resources in the process.

At 50, the lanky lawyer--who wears ostrich-skin cowboy boots and walks across his downtown Denver office like a man walking the range--has become a lightning rod in the movement advocating property rights and constitutional reforms to empower states.

“What people want today is what Thomas Jefferson wanted: ‘Government closest to the people,’ ” Pendley said. “A government they have control over, a government they can influence, a government in which they can seek solutions that are creative and applicable to them.”

Pendley scored a major coup in June in a case he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court involving white Colorado Springs contractor Randy Pech, who lost a federal contract for a guardrail installation to a Latino firm even though he had submitted a lower bid.

In that case, known as Adarand Constructors Inc. vs. Pena, the court ruled that preferential treatment based on race is almost always unconstitutional, even when it is intended to benefit minority groups that suffered injustices in the past.

The Latino firm had benefited from a 1987 law requiring the Transportation Department to steer at least 10% of its contracts to businesses owned by racial minorities or women.

But the Supreme Court stopped short of deciding the case in favor of Pech. The matter was sent back to a federal judge in Denver to determine whether the federal program meets a new strict scrutiny test set forth in Adarand: The government must show a compelling interest to use race in awarding government contracts.

Nonetheless, Pendley, an ex-Marine and son of an Arkansas railroad worker counts the ruling as “an incredible boost to the foundation.”

The foundation was set up in 1977, amid the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, by Colorado brewer Joseph Coors and James G. Watt--who went on to become Interior secretary under Reagan--to challenge in court everything from environmental laws to affirmative action requirements.

Essentially, the foundation asserts that the federal government should recognize the economic needs of Westerners when it comes to how grazing is done and how forest and mineral resources are managed.

The cases it handles are chosen by two independent boards that monitor court rulings for nuances that might open a door.

Environmental groups denounce the foundation as a mouthpiece for resource industries. The Mountain States Legal Foundation’s annual operating budget of slightly less than $1 million is largely donated by mining and timber interests and conservative funding foundations, including one controlled by the Coors family.

“They’re a bunch of private lawyers cloaking themselves in public interest garb for big businesses that can afford their own counsel,” said Lori Potter, a staff attorney for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Denver.

But Pendley insists his group is a “protector of the little guy” in battles against well-funded environmental groups and “the biggest law firm in the world--the federal government.”

It’s a theme of his latest book, “War on the West: Government Tyranny on America’s Great Frontier,” which suggests, he said, that “the current battle in the West is not about the environment, but a vision by environmental groups that does not include people.”

On other fronts, the foundation is trying to stop the $12-million federal effort to populate the tri-state region of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana with Canadian wolves that ranchers fear will attack livestock, and is challenging the Brady gun-control law in Wyoming.