Election Focuses on Environment

Michela Alioto had just arrived at a Mendocino County sawmill, one of many rural campaign stops where the city-bred granddaughter of a famous San Francisco mayor hoped to persuade loggers, truck drivers and small-town merchants that she could effectively represent them in Congress.

“Is that where you measure the logs?” Alioto asked, pointing to a series of numbered signs on the lawn behind the offices of Harwood Products.

“No,” Art Harwood said softly. “That’s the employee driving range. The markers tell you how far you’ve hit your golf ball.”

No one laughed more merrily at the gaffe than Alioto herself. But the laughter quickly subsided as a crew of grizzled mill hands watched the diminutive Alioto, paralyzed from the waist down by a ski accident, muscle her wheelchair up and down the mill’s steep metal catwalks, gradually putting the men at ease with her contagious laughter and unaffected curiosity about their work.

With much the same mix of naivete and nerve, the 28-year-old Democrat is campaigning up and down California’s far north coast, seeking to unseat Republican Rep. Frank Riggs and become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

The race, in a district that has been the most politically unpredictable of any in the state, has become a key battle in determining which party will control the next Congress. It has also become a high-profile test of Democratic assaults on Republican positions on environmental issues.

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Unlike Alioto, who moved to the district a year ago, the 46-year-old Riggs doesn’t need a road map to find his way to hamlets like Branscomb.

A former sheriff’s deputy and small-business man, Riggs has raised a family here, served on school boards and done Little League duty. He is a staunch convert to the new conservatism and its firebrand denunciations of government spending and regulation.

But in many parts of a district that still values neighborliness, Riggs is known less as a conservative ideologist than as a genial, hard-working public servant whose loyalty to the House leadership has paid off for his constituents.

Alioto argues that Riggs’ opposition to environmental regulation hurts the district economically. “The 1st Congressional District has lost thousands of jobs in the fishing industry and thousands of jobs in the timber industry as a result of the kind of overharvesting championed by my opponent,” Alioto said.

“He doesn’t see the connection between a healthy environment and a healthy economy.”

Riggs cites his long-standing opposition to oil drilling off the coast of California, to the federal money he has sought to rehabilitate fresh-water fish habitat in local rivers and to his support for the recent Headwaters Forest agreement, which is aimed at protecting several thousand acres of north coast virgin redwoods now in private hands.

Nonetheless, Riggs’ votes to weaken the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, to bar lawsuits against heavy logging of national forests, to create a commission to reduce the size of the national park system and to curb the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over pesticides, refinery emissions and sewage runoff have earned him a place on the target list compiled by the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters.

The two environmental groups say they plan to spend more than $1 million in seeking the defeat of targeted House members, who include five other Western Republicans. Democrats hope that environmental issues will make the difference in a number of key races--particularly in the West.

“The environment is working in Western races stronger than ever before,” said Celinda Lake, a pollster working for Democratic candidates in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.

“Arguments around clean air, clean water, toxic waste and public lands have turned around and helped put Democrats on the offensive,” Lake said.

For Riggs, this is a different campaign, in many ways, from 1994, when he ran as a supporter of the GOP’s “contract with America” and its repudiation of big government.

Last Sunday, during the first of three planned debates with Alioto, Riggs presented himself as a politician who knows how to bring home the bacon. He cited his efforts to secure $32 million in federal money for a new veterans hospital at Travis Air Force Base, as well as funds for a variety of highway improvements and for a harbor expansion project in Eureka.

After the debate, confronted by a disabled college student who was an Alioto supporter, Riggs listened as the young woman spoke tearfully of being denied food stamps and of possibly facing slow starvation.

Promising to help, Riggs told her: “I’m here. I’m an advocate. You did the right thing by talking to me. Your voting decision will have no effect on my efforts.”

It was a disarming performance and not an atypical one, say observers of the race.

“Riggs could make it real challenging for the Democrats,” said Milt Boyd, a teachers union representative on the faculty of Humboldt State University. “He’s very good at basic constituent service, and he’s touching base with a number of groups he didn’t used to pay much attention to.”

Meanwhile, Riggs portrays Alioto as a clueless ingenue who doesn’t know log splitting from logrolling and who has gotten where she has on the strength of her name and her family’s money.

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Alioto--granddaughter of Joseph Alioto, San Francisco mayor from 1968 to 1976--admits she forgot to vote in 1994. She was working in Washington on the staff of Vice President Al Gore at the time and failed to obtain an absentee ballot, she said. Nor does she argue with the claim that she moved into the district just two weeks before the deadline for filing as a candidate or that she bulled her way through a crowded Democratic primary partly on the strength of $300,000 of her own money.

Alioto dismisses those matters as distractions thrown up by Riggs to divert voters from the real issues.

But she still must work to persuade skeptics in her own party that there is substance to her candidacy.

“She’s for all the right things, the environment, women’s rights, labor,” said David Colfax, a radio commentator and school board member in Mendocino County. “But once you get past the first line of her message, there’s no second line. It’s as if she’s content to recite the Democratic Party platform and not really offer anything of her own.”

The Riggs campaign believes Alioto’s opposition to the death penalty and her endorsements by prominent environmental organizations will turn voters against her in the rural north coast communities where at least a quarter of the district’s voters live.

But the 1st District is one of the least homogeneous in the state, and particularly in the southern end of the district, where environmentalism is not an ugly word, the name “Alioto” is better known and President Clinton’s coattails probably will be the longest.

Moreover, even in timber country, Alioto’s environmental sentiments don’t necessarily cancel her appeal.

Watching her scramble onto her brother’s back to climb a stairway to get a better view of how the Branscomb mill worked, a group of employees and executives were transfixed.

“I’m not too worried about some of the things that she says,” said Calvin Harwood, a member of the family that owns the mill. “She looks like she’ll be a hard worker, and that’s got to count for something.”