Road to County Action Paved With Gold

As the Soka University expansion plan made its way toward approval by the Board of Supervisors last month, the school shelled out $320,000 for lobbyists--tripling its spending over the past three years.

When Newhall Land & Farming began the process of getting county approval for its massive Newhall Ranch housing development late last year, the company handed out $26,500 in contributions to county supervisors over six months and spent $16,700 on lobbyists.

For years it has been common practice for firms with large projects awaiting county approval to spend freely on lobbyists and to contribute generously to supervisors.

The practice is perfectly legal. But company officials generally remain circumspect when asked about the link between money and county approval.

“I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on that,” said Rodney W. Walter II, general manager of the Chiquita Canyon Landfill when asked about the timing between the company’s contributions to supervisors and last month’s 4-0 vote by supervisors to expand the Santa Clarita Valley trash dump.

Laidlaw Waste Systems, the operator of Chiquita Canyon, donated $30,000 to the campaigns of the five county supervisors during the six months prior to the board’s favorable vote.

Other disclosures during the past several months have also focused attention on large companies, the projects they pursue and the amount of money they are willing to pay to achieve their ends.

For instance, campaign reports show that from October through December, MCA spent more than $31,000 on lobbyists for its controversial proposed expansion of Universal City, which is pending before the county Regional Planning Commission.

Just last month, a community group in Val Verde dropped opposition, based on health and safety concerns, to the Chiquita Canyon project after Laidlaw and owner Newhall Land agreed to pay the residents of the impoverished town as much as $280,000 annually for the next 22 years. In return, the size and capacity of the dump was increased.

Grass-roots groups, maintaining the playing field is not level, have been particularly critical about the recent developments.

“Any developer who has full-time lobbyists who can bend the ear of a supervisor on a daily basis, telling them about the jobs the project will create, and the revenue it will bring in, has a leg up on nondevelopment interests,” said Les Hardie former president of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation, which battled the Soka University expansion. “We can’t compete with it.”

The companies contend that paying campaign contributions are part of doing business with the county, and lobbyists are necessary to explain proposals to supervisors, their staff members and other county officials.

Further, lobbyists, who are often former county officials with long and close relationships with current county decision-makers, are widely considered to be necessary tools in gaining access to the five supervisors, who have a premium on their time.

“If we wanted to meet with the supervisors, the lobbyist would arrange the meeting,” said Ronald R. Gastelum chief administrative officer for BKK Corp., on efforts to win county approval for a dump at Elsmere Canyon, near Santa Clarita. “What we get is access. There is no guaranteed result, but at least you get your story told.”

Plans for the dump never reached the Board of Supervisors, and were eventually foiled in Congress last year.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich said neither the presence of lobbyists nor the promise of big campaign contributions has swayed him into making a particular decision.

“People who contribute are buying my philosophy,” he said. “I am not buying their philosophy.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents most of the San Fernando Valley, declined to comment for this story.

Yaroslavsky helped write Proposition B, an attempt to limit the influence of lobbyists that was approved by voters in November. The initiative places a $1,000 contribution limit on donations to supervisorial candidates who agree to spend less than $100,000 on their campaigns, and limits contributions by lobbyists to county officials.

Both Proposition B and Proposition 208, a statewide initiative on campaign-finance reform approved in November, leave many issues regarding lobbyists untouched, advocates for campaign reform said.

“Neither Prop. 208 nor Prop. B completely solves the problem, but both of them are better than what existed before [in Los Angeles County], which was nothing,” said Elizabeth Lambe, an analyst with California Common Cause. Patricia Schifferly, an environmental consultant at Washington-based Clean Water Action, said county government is particularly susceptible to influence.

“Money has more impact at the county than at almost any other level because the supervisors decide land use issues,” Schifferly said. “And a lot of the money in contributions come from developers.”

In February, the Board of Supervisors approved in principle Laidlaw’s plans to expand Chiquita Canyon Landfill, situated just outside the predominantly low-income community of Val Verde.

After a series of intense negotiations, the Val Verde Civic Assn. decided to no longer oppose the dump over health and safety concerns. The group also agreed to allow Laidlaw to operate the dump for more years--and to accept more trash than county planners had been willing to allow.

In return, the small town--which has no sewer system and whose only commercial business is a small convenience store--could receive as much as $5.5 million for community improvements over the next two decades.

Lobbying reports show that in the eight months preceding the supervisors’ endorsement of the plan, Laidlaw contributed $30,000 to board members, and paid $227 in golf fees for a tournament and dinner for an aide to Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke. Laidlaw gave $16,000 to its legal counsel, Latham & Watkins, and lobbyists Wirth & Associates to promote the project.

On the other side, Ruth Griffin, president of the Val Verde Civic Assn., said the group spent about $11,000 opposing the dump--$8,000 of which came from the city of Santa Clarita, the rest from the community.

The group was unable even to afford the $5,000 needed to appeal the county Regional Planning Commission’s decision approving the landfill expansion to the Board of Supervisors. The city of Santa Clarita and the Newhall Water District bankrolled the appeal.

“Without them appealing for us, we would have been dead in the water,” Griffin said.

Walter, the general manager of the landfill, said his corporation donated liberally to each of the supervisors because they generally saw eye-to-eye with Laidlaw.

“We hadn’t been particularly active [in giving campaign contributions] and felt we needed to be more active in county politics,” Walter said. “These were people who had generally been supportive of solid waste issues. . . . They were people who we felt we wanted to be in office when decisions were made.”

Another group battling a landfill, the North Valley Coalition of Concerned Citizens, also maintained they simply did not have the money to fight expansion of a nearby dump at Sunshine Canyon.

The coalition eventually began quietly accepting money from Waste Management Inc., the chief business rival of Browning-Ferris. Waste Management also began lobbying supervisors and other county officials against the Sunshine Canyon dump.

But Arnie Berghoff, Browning-Ferris’ vice president of governmental affairs and its primary lobbyist in Los Angeles, said the advantage in development battles usually belongs to community groups, not large corporations and their lobbyists.

“Interest groups that control votes have much more power than a company that contributes money,” said Berghoff, a former employee with the city of Los Angeles. “What do I have to offer? Do I live in the community? No. Can I get the votes out? No. All I have is a quality project that will hopefully help the district.”

Still, county lobbying disclosure statements reveal that the company contributed $27,000 to board members in 1996 and that Berghoff gave Yaroslavsky a $28 Los Angeles Lakers ticket and took various county officials to lunch at upscale downtown eateries such as the City Club, Cafe Pinot, McCormick & Schmicks, the Epicentre, Stepps and Il Fornaio.

Berghoff said given the potential contribution limits set in Proposition B, it was important for his firm to give in the “$4,000 to $5,000 [per supervisor] area” to successfully compete with other trash firms.

But while Berghoff said one-on-one meetings with key supervisorial and other county staff members is his most effective lobbying tool, Waste Management tends toward the extravagant.

Waste Management, which owns Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley and Simi Valley Landfill, holds annual dinners in the Palm Springs area each May that sometimes cost more than $11,000. The guest list is a who’s who of county power brokers.

Past guests have included then-Supervisor Deane Dana, Supervisor Don Knabe when he was Dana’s chief deputy, Assessor Kenneth Hahn, County Counsel DeWitt Clinton, Public Works Director Harry Stone, Treasurer/Tax Collector Larry Monteilh, Planning Commission member Pat Russell and former Planning Commission member Fred Guido, who is now chief of staff for Knabe.

Newhall Land, whose massive Newhall Ranch is pending before the Planning Commission, has donated money to various local and state officials for several years, including a total of $36,800 to county supervisors in 1996, according to campaign statements.

The money, Newhall Land spokeswoman Marlee Lauffer said, is given to politicians who are in step with the company’s philosophy.

“We try to give to the people who are pro-business or pro-development in Los Angeles County,” Lauffer said.

Meanwhile, Soka University spokesman Jeff Ourvan said Soka spent $320,000 on lobbyists in the final six months of 1996 to prepare for technical work on the project’s environmental impact report.

Only a fraction of the money, he said, was spent on traditional lobbying.

“A typical EIR process goes for a longer period of time, but this one was crunched into a six-month period,” said Ourvan, referring to the expedited settlement deal with the county that ended a long, bitter dispute over the pristine property in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Ourvan said the battle forced the university to accept a much smaller expansion plan than it had wanted.

“[Even] without money, they did pretty good against us for the last seven years,” Ourvan said. “The university got hammered.”

The opponents, however, see it another way.

“The thing is,” said Margo Feuer, founder of the environmental group, Save Open Space, “is that Soka lobbyists were all former county employees.”

The delicate relationship between the hired guns and the elected officials they are paid to influence came up at a recent board meeting.

Yaroslavsky told a Soka lobbyist who had just finished testifying: “If I can be so bold and crude as to say [that] no greater waste of money has anybody spent than the money your client spent on lobbyists. In that end, it had no impact on the outcome.”

Yaroslavsky paused, then added, “But I’m sure you’re worth every penny you charge.”

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Big Spenders

Four companies needing county approval for building plans were among the major contributors to supervisors and the biggest spenders for lobbying in the last six months of 1996:

Business: Laidlaw Waste Systems, Inc.

Project: Chiquita Canyon landfill

Campaign contributions to supervisors: $30,000

Amount spent lobbying: $16,217

*

Business: Soka University

Project: Soka Univ. expansion

Campaign contributions to supervisors: n/a

Amount spent lobbying: $320,000

*

Business: Newhall Land & Farming Co.

Project: Newhall Ranch

Campaign contributions to supervisors: $26,500

Amount spent lobbying: $16,791

Note: Soka is a private non-profit, and cannot contribute to candidates.