D.C. Lobbyist for Toll Road Packard Aided Is Contributor

Rep. Ron Packard, the lawmaker who crafted an unusual provision that would limit environmental review of the controversial Foothill South toll road, has accepted $7,000 in campaign donations from the toll road’s Washington lobbyist, records show.

Attorney James F. McConnell made 12 donations of $500 or $1,000 from 1989 to 1996 to Packard, the Vista Republican who tucked into a huge transportation spending bill a one-paragraph provision that would restrict how broadly federal regulatory agencies could critique the toll road. The bill won a key House subcommittee’s approval this week.

Neither Packard nor McConnell could be reached Friday in Washington for comment.

Packard’s chief of staff, Ray Mock, said drawing any connection between the contributions and the congressman’s actions is “ludicrous.” Mock said while McConnell is “a longtime supporter” of Packard, the congressman is likely unaware of donations. A spokesman for the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which runs Orange County’s toll roads, said it is “very doubtful” that donations were inappropriate in any way.

But longtime county political reform activist Shirley Grindle said the money changing hands from McConnell to Packard is part of “the Washington game” in which lobbyists and politicians rely on one another.

McConnell “knows how to keep his contacts with elected officials,” Grindle said. “He pays his dues, which is what I call his campaign contributions. . . . He plays the game.”

The toll road agencies are just part of McConnell’s portfolio of county clients--he also stumps in Washington for the Orange County government, the Orange County Transportation Authority and the Orange County Water District. Mock said that wide range of employers makes it ridiculous to try to forge ties between the donations and any single bill or provision.

The unusual legislative overture by Packard this week to narrow the environmental review of the Foothill South toll road was blasted again Friday by environmentalists who called it an attempt to muzzle criticism of the project.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said David Carlson, a scientist with the Environmental Protection Agency working on the project. “I’ve never known of a legislator trying to change the ground rules like this in a highway project. . . . This would limit our ability to ask important questions.”

If made law, the provision would effectively undercut two key federal environmental agencies that have raised questions about the need for the 16-mile toll road segment that would run through what some environmentalists describe as fragile South County ecosystems.

Both the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have questioned the need for the $644-million toll road that would cleave the San Onofre State Beach while linking Oso Parkway to Interstate 5.

Conversely, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has approved the need for the project, a coveted approval that a source in Packard’s office called a key factor in the congressman’s move.

“We believe it is a good-government provision,” the source said. “We believe that this road can be built in an environmentally sensitive manner. [The two environmental agencies] are simply objecting because they don’t want to build the road.”

Another member of Packard’s staff said the provision was neither unusual nor especially noteworthy. But Roy Kienitz, executive director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project in Washington, said Packard’s tactic is relatively rare because it is aimed at a specific project.

“This is the first time I’ve heard of this in quite a while,” said Kienitz, whose group advocates alternate modes of transportation. “It’s pretty common to put language in tailored to help a single project, but this effort to stifle the purpose and need process is not very common at all.”

The definition of “purpose and need”--and who can subject a project to wide-reaching scrutiny--is an ongoing topic of argument between transportation planning officials and the environmental regulators who screen their projects.

Environmental officials say federal laws give them free rein to question the need for projects and weigh their alternatives.

That view was supported by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in a decision last year on an Illinois dam project. The federal planners had so narrowly defined the purpose and need of the project that they had excluded a wide range of options from the review process and performed an “end run” past environmental regulators, the court ruled.

“It comes down to the way they frame the purpose and how that limits the review,” says Dan Silver, coordinator of Endangered Habitats League and a foe of the Foothill South. “If you say the purpose is to relieve congestion in 20 years, you can come up with a number of alternatives, like adding lanes [to existing roads]. But if you say the purpose is to build a toll road from here to here, then you cut off the debate.”

In the case of the Foothill, Carlson said his agency worries that the TCA is “defining the need as the project” instead of looking at the full range of options. “It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy then,” he said.

But Michael Ward, chairman of the toll road’s board of directors, said the Packard provision will only focus the dialogue and expedite a lagging review process.

“We just want these different environmental agencies to stay within their realms,” Ward said. “I think [these] agencies define their duties in a very broad scope to give themselves more things to do.”