One More Whore of Babylon: The Planning and Conservation League

In the run-up to the November election, many environmentalists in California received a mailing from one of the state's most prominent conservation groups, the Planning and Conservation League. The letter was an advisory on the election, paying particular attention to two initiatives on the ballot. Environmentalists were urged to support Proposition 7, a complex tax-break for trucking firms and other polluters, and to oppose Proposition 9, the measure intending to roll back the rate-payer financed bail-out of the state's electric utilities.

The letter was signed by Jerry Meral, PCL's long-time executive director, and it sported dozens of member groups on its letterhead. Meral claimed that Proposition 9 broke promises that the environmental groups had made to the legislature and the utility industry in the fall of 1996 when it supported legislation "deregulating" the state's electricity market. "PCL urges you to vote NO on Proposition 9," the letter proclaimed. "It would supposedly offer a rate cut to electricity users. But whether that would ever happen depends on the outcome of the extensive and lengthy litigation that would result from the passage of Proposition 9."

Meral said that PCL "regretted taking a position against consumer groups, but noted that without energy conservation and renewable energy programs, lowering the price of energy could result in greater energy use with accompanying environmental consequences."

Meral's collusion in the onslaught on Proposition 9, which ultimately went down to defeat partly because of the utility industry's $45 million media blitz, surprised some of the PCL's member groups, who were not consulted on the matter and who were on record in support of Proposition 9. When Meral was first asked why the letter included the names of these groups, Meral denied that it had. When confronted with a photocopy of the letter, Meral blamed it on "a clerical error." The letter prompted Citizens for a Better Environment to pull out of the PCL coalition.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian, in an excellent report by Savannah Blackwell, discloses that Meral's group pocketed $70,000 from Pacific Gas and Electric for its work on another campaign around the same time it went on the offensive against Proposition 9.

In October the PCL board held an internal debate on Proposition 9. It invited Proposition 9's chief sponsor, Harvey Rosenfeld, and utility economist Eugene Coyle, to present the case for the initiative and Ralph Cavanagh, the free-market guru of electricity policy from NRDC, to argue against the measure. Meral laconically described Coyle, one of the most astute policy analysts on energy issues in the nation, as "formerly being with a utility reform group." In contrast, Meral introduced Cavanagh as "an internationally known energy analyst." To compound matters, Meral hinted that the money Rosenfeld's group spent to collect signatures to put the initiative on the ballot came from unclean hands. According to Coyle, Meral implied to the board that the money came from the oil companies. The allegation was absurd. The funds actually derived from the San Francisco-based Public Media Center.

Meral's own hands were scarcely clean themselves. In a December 9 letter, widely distributed, Rosenfeld charges that Meral's broadside, attacking Proposition 9, was financed by the utilities to the tune of $900,000. Rosenfeld concludes that Meral's group "compromised its principles and betrayed its ostensible constituency" in "an unprecedented collusion" with the electric utilities.

None of this should surprise anyone familiar with how PCL operates. Over the past decade it has become little more than a green sell-out shop in Sacramento. PCL was conceived in 1968 as a way to muster the lobbying might of environmental groups in the state capitol. Today, the group packs a mullet-million dollar budget and claims to represent "more than 125 grassroots groups."

Since 1983 PCL has been run by Meral, a former aide to Jerry Brown. Meral also worked for the Environmental Defense Fund, where he helped to develop that group's notorious brand of environmental capitalism. Meral now works closely with EDF economists and regularly uses them to support his corporate agitprop on electricity and water issues.

The board of PCL is heavily freighted with developers, corporate executives and kindred Democratic Party hacks. One of the most prominent members is Harriet Burgess, director of the American Land Conservancy. Burgess is a close friend of Bruce Babbitt and has zealously promoted the concept of "land exchanges" and buy-outs as a way to protect endangered species habitat. Most notoriously, Burgess brokered a horrible $78 million land swap that bought up land in the Lake Tahoe Basin, but gave away property in southern California to be developed by Del Webb. Similarly, Burgess's group engineered a forest land swap in northern California that protected a 220 grove of old-growth Doug-fir in the Mattole valley by consigning a similar patch BLM-owned old-growth at McCoy Creek to the chainsaws of the Lancaster Logging Company. The McCoy Creek grove was near the Sinkyone Wilderness and supported a thriving coho salmon run.

Also on PCL's foundation board is Frank Boren, the former president of the immensely powerful pro-corporate Nature Conservancy who now heads an awful group called Sustainable Conservation, which rakes in contributions from Bank of America, Disney, and Southern California Edison. Boren is close to Gov. Pete Wilson, who tapped him as his Commissioner of Fish and Game Commission in 1990. Boren now sits on the board of directors of ARCO, the oil giant that is poised to expand its Alaska drilling operations into the unblemished National Petroleum Reserve.

The PCL board also includes a pair of corporate executives. David Hirsch, who resides in Taylor, Michigan, is an executive with MASCO, a large building products and property management firm lines into California real estate action. The PCL Foundation's secretary/treasurer is Robert C. Kirkwood, an executive at the Hewlett-Packard Company. Hewlett-Packard, like other Silicon Valley giants, is a major polluter, also a waterholic and power-guzzler.

Such ductility in policy matters and ties to corporate executives have made PCL a dumping ground for corporate cash. They have raked in gross contributions from both the Hewlett and Packard Foundations and, most intriguingly, the James Irvine Foundation. The Irvine Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the southern California developer who has destroyed more coastal sagebrush and gnatcatcher habitat than any other human. Is it scarcely an accident that PCL supported the gutting of California Endangered Species Act and has shamelessly promoted Habitat Conservation Plans that allow developers like Irvine to destroy endanger species habitat and compensate them for not breaking the few laws that remain on the books.

At its annual meeting this year, PCL gave Mike Thompson their legislator of the year award. On the North Coast, Thompson is known for his fanatic support of Big Timber. The group also invited California State senator John Burton to address the board. Burton gave a survey of upcoming legislative events and then took questions. He was asked, "When PCL's name comes up in Sacramento, what image comes to mind?" Burton shot back quickly, "As environmental sell-outs. Everyone in the Capitol knows that PCL is hand-maiden of the corporations." No one on the PCL board was shocked by the description.