Copyright The Washington Post Company Nov 14, 1998

Last of three articles

From the moment he was dispatched to break ground on the first of the massive landfills that would soon make Virginia a national trash hub, Lowell C. Spires Jr. knew one thing: To reach his goal, he had to enlist the centers of influence and power.

"It doesn't take you long to identify who those people are," the South Carolina marketing expert said. "If you're going to succeed, you need their help. I've never tried to work {a landfill project} where I didn't work the local officials, the regional officials, the state officials."

Through a decade of dramatic expansion in Virginia, the trash industry has followed that strategy, cultivating alliances that stretch from the town halls of poor rural communities to the marble halls of Richmond. Today, the head of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality is a former lobbyist for one of the nation's biggest trash companies. The chief lobbyist for another giant trash concern is the former Virginia secretary of natural resources.

One company hired influential legislators as consultants and lawyers to promote its cause with local officials in two counties. And a then-state senator negotiated a $3 million sale of money-losing timberland as the site for one of the East Coast's largest landfills -- after he had urged local officials to open the landfill.

In recent years, bill after bill that would have stunted the trash industry's growth or increased scrutiny of its enterprises died in the legislature, while bills to protect its markets became law.

Collectively, over the last three years, the trash industry has donated nearly $400,000 to Virginia candidates, according to campaign finance reports. The amount is modest compared with the tobacco industry, which donated about $1.2 million to Virginia campaigns during the same period. But it is on a level with health maintenance organizations, which face a number of state regulatory issues and contributed more than $550,000.

The story of big business working to influence public policy is not unusual, although it is fueled in Virginia's case by campaign, lobbying and conflict-of-interest regulations that give industry great leeway in advocating its cause.

Del. W.W. "Ted" Bennett Jr. (D-Halifax) said legislators are "smart enough" not to be unduly influenced by a well-connected industry, even if they have a personal relationship with some of the business's advocates. "We have our obligations to our constituents and the people of the commonwealth at large," said Bennett, who has served in the legislature for eight years. "The industry doesn't reelect me; my constituents do."

But for many watching from the sidelines, the political relationships painstakingly built by the trash industry illustrate what is wrong with business as usual.

"Being a statesman should be a far cry from being a garbage man. It is truly a shame that some people don't know the difference," said James W. Sharp, executive director of Campaign Virginia, a Richmond-based environmental group.

Enter Chambers Trash Firm

The building of the industry's political network started a decade ago in Charles City County.

The farming community, 25 miles east of Richmond, had little tax base in the late 1980s; there was no shopping center, no motel, no bank -- not even a red light.

Chambers Development Co., a Pittsburgh-based trash firm that was growing quickly and looking to expand south, considered the county an ideal site. Land was relatively cheap. It had a rail line. It was close enough to the James River that one day trash might be delivered by barge, and most important, it wasn't far from Interstate 95, with its access to cities up and down the East Coast.

Company officials knew it would be a delicate task persuading a community to approve a landfill designed in large part to take out-of-state waste, said Spires, who coordinated Chambers's Virginia effort. So the company enlisted Del. Alan A. Diamonstein (D-Newport News), who was known across the South as a fund-raiser and power broker, active in the national Democratic Party as well as chairman of the Virginia state party. Chambers hired him to handle legal matters, and introductions, in its new southern markets.

Diamonstein made another hire, Del. C. Hardaway Marks (D-Charles City), a 15-term member of the House of Delegates. The conservative Democrat and lawyer was the second most senior member of the House at the time.

Diamonstein said Marks was hired as Chambers's "local counsel, advising us what was happening in the county" relative to the Chambers bid. But Marks did more. He used his influence to convince Charles City County supervisors that it would be a smart idea to build the mega-fill and that Chambers was the company to do it.

C. Hill Carter Jr., then a Charles City County supervisor, said in a recent interview that at the time, he wasn't sure whether he should trust Diamonstein or Chambers. So he turned to Marks.

"I may be a little out of date, but I like to know what I am dealing with, what kind of people they are," Carter said. "I find somebody who knows more about it than I do, and then I go to them. That is what I did with Hardaway."

Marks, Carter said, assured him that Diamonstein "was a good, reputable lawyer" and that "Chambers was a good company." With that, Carter said, he put aside his doubts and endorsed the contract. The matter passed in a 2 to 1 vote.

Marks didn't tell Carter he was on Chambers's payroll.

Marks said there was nothing improper in not mentioning that connection. The landfill, he said, has benefited the county, bringing revenue that made possible a tax cut and paid off debt on three schools.

Carter's family, too, has benefited: His son, daughter and wife own 15 acres where Waste Management Inc., the company that has taken control of Chambers's assets, is investing $15 million to build a trash barge port. Waste Management, based in Houston, said it rents the land from Carter's relatives for more than $100,000 a year. "Things have turned out very well for us," Carter said.

Charles City County's mega-fill opened in 1990 with a ribbon-cutting attended by then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder (D) and 200 other state and local officials and business leaders. Within the next five years, similar deals would be signed with six more Virginia communities.

Diamonstein's work for Chambers declined shortly after the opening of one of those mega-fills, in Amelia County, when Chambers ran into financial trouble. He said he still handles occasional legal matters for Waste Management.

State law requires that legislators, whose elected positions are part-time jobs, disclose their financial interests. If they have a "personal interest" in a matter before the General Assembly, they can participate in the debate but not vote. A financial disclosure form filed in Richmond indicates that Diamonstein owns more than $50,000 in stock of a trash company that merged with Waste Management. Diamonstein would not say how much he was paid in all by Chambers, suggesting only that it was a "substantial" amount. But he did say he remains comfortable with his dual role as a legislator and trash industry lawyer.

"It is about relationships," Diamonstein said, adding that since being hired by the trash companies, he has abstained on trash-related votes in the legislature, which his voting record shows. "People tend to go to people with knowledge and expertise and who know how to get across points. . . . As long as you handle it appropriately and it is disclosed, I don't see anything wrong with it."

The Legislative Record

The bridges the trash industry built in Charles City County carried it ultimately to Richmond.

In the last five years, at least 13 bills have been introduced in the Virginia General Assembly that would have increased the state's role in managing landfill construction, limited the transportation of trash in Virginia or increased trash-industry regulation.

Again and again, the bills died or were defeated.

In 1994, for example, before three of the mega-fills had won state permits, Del. W. Tayloe Murphy Jr. (D-Westmoreland) proposed legislation that would have created a state planning process to, among other things, evaluate how much landfill capacity Virginia needs.

Absent such a review, local governments and private companies have had a free hand in building mega-fills, as long as they met required environmental standards. The result has been a huge overcapacity in Virginia that has attracted 3 million tons a year of out-of-state trash.

Murphy's bill stalled for a year and then was defeated in 1995.

Other trash-related bills that died would have required referendums in communities where large landfills are proposed, banned trash barges on state rivers and encouraged Congress to pass legislation allowing states to regulate the flow of out-of-state trash.

As with any legislation, there were a variety of reasons why those bills failed, legislators said. But Del. Harvey B. Morgan (R-Gloucester), who introduced several of them, said the industry's connections, clout and money made a real difference.

"The industry has a huge presence," Morgan said. "It is very difficult to go up against." The trash-related legislation the General Assembly did pass during the last five years illustrates that point.

For Northern Virginia, perhaps the most important trash-related legislation was a 1995 bill that protected the industry from competition from local governments. It required counties and cities to buy out a trash hauler's client base or give haulers five years' notice before starting a government-controlled collection service.

Many of Virginia's local governments, including Fairfax and Prince William counties, objected to the the bill because they wanted the option to expand government-sponsored trash collection as a means of drawing more trash -- and dumping fees -- to their landfills and incinerators, which have been struggling financially since the private mega-fills opened.

But the industry, which argued that the bill would protect small-business men who ran waste-hauling companies, was persuasive, said Larry Land, director of policy development for the Virginia Association of Counties. The trash lobbyists signed up co-sponsors and suggested language for the bill, according to Waste Management lobbyist John W. Daniel.

"There was just something bigger than someone like myself could ever overcome," said Land, who testified against the bill. "At a certain point, I realized it was just going to go through."

Two bills already have been proposed for the 1999 legislative session that would try to restrict out-of-state waste, including a moratorium on landfill growth and a cap on the amount of trash existing landfills can take.

Murphy said he believes the momentum has finally built to take decisive action to enhance regulation of the industry.

"A lot of good legislation has failed over the years because the public interest, the collective interest of the citizens of the commonwealth, has been subordinated to a single, self-serving interest," Murphy said. "That is wrong. That is not why any of us are here. We were elected to represent the entire state."

Official Lobbying

Steve Calos, executive director of the Virginia branch of Common Cause, said the story of the trash industry's growth in Virginia points to the need to revise state campaign finance and ethics laws.

"When it comes to ethics and campaign finance laws, Virginia might as well be in the old wild, wild West," he said. "Almost anything goes."

State law requires officials to wait a year after leaving office before they can directly lobby the agency they once worked for, and former legislators can't be hired as General Assembly lobbyists for at least a year. Those restrictions have not hampered the trash industry as it lined up a cadre of former state officials to represent its interests in Richmond.

Daniel, 49, the Waste Management lobbyist, is a Richmond native and lawyer who spent 13 years with the state, as a legislative staff attorney in the attorney general's office and finally as secretary of natural resources under Gov. Gerald L. Baliles (D), a post he held until 1990.

Today, Daniel is a lawyer with McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe. He started representing Waste Management within weeks of his departure from state government. His move took place before the revolving-door law was passed.

The lobbying team for Browning-Ferris Industries Inc., the nation's second-largest trash firm, includes H. Benson Dendy III and Philip F. Abraham, both former aides to Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) and Baliles. Dendy served as secretary of the commonwealth when Robb was governor and secretary to the governor's Cabinet for Baliles. Abraham was a policy adviser to Robb and Baliles.

Legal matters for Browning-Ferris are handled in part by Patrick A. O'Hare, who from 1982 to 1993 served as senior assistant attorney general and chief of the office's natural resources section.

The chief of the Browning-Ferris team in the last session was Dennis H. Treacy, a former environmental lawyer for the Virginia attorney general. Treacy withdrew his registration as a Browning-Ferris lobbyist March 22, the day before Gilmore named him director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, which regulates the trash industry.

At the time Treacy left Browning-Ferris, the firm had an application pending before the Department of Environmental Quality for permission to expand its King and Queen County landfill. After taking over the agency, Treacy appointed three Department of Environmental Quality division directors to make all final decisions on matters related to Browning-Ferris, saying he wanted to avoid any appearance of impropriety. The department has since approved the firm's landfill expansion request.

Trash industry leaders say they are glad to have a friend at the state regulatory agency.

"You have someone you can get your viewpoint across with," said J. Victor Arthur III, director of the Virginia Waste Industries Association. "Someone who has an open mind, someone who is willing to listen to all sides of an argument and someone you don't have to introduce yourself to. You already know him."

One Legislator's Land Deal

State Sen. Elmon T. Gray was certainly no stranger to Sussex County officials in 1991, when he began discussing plans for a mega-fill in the county. The conservative, multimillionaire Democrat had served in the state Senate for 20 years, assuming office in 1971 after his father retired after 28 years in the Senate.

Five generations of the Gray family had lived in Sussex, running a timber and sawmill operation. By the early 1990s, Gray and his relatives owned more than 100,000 acres across southern Virginia and a large sawmill in Sussex, assets that made them the county's second-largest employer and the state's largest private landowner.

Sussex needed a new courthouse and renovations to its schools and existing landfill but didn't have the money for them. Gray said recently that he met with a county board member privately to talk about possible solutions and settled on trying to find a firm to open a revenue-generating regional landfill in the county.

Gray offered a piece of his land for the landfill project -- 700 acres that had recently been cleared of timber, reducing its value to about $500 an acre, by Gray's estimate. Once negotiations over the project had concluded, Gray was offered $4,415 an acre, or $3.1 million, for his family's property.

"After suffering five or six years of money-losing lumber business, it was nice to get a good price," Gray said, adding that the price reflected what other landfill companies had paid for their land.

Opposition to the proposed landfill was intense. About 700 people -- or nearly seven percent of the county's residents -- packed a hearing in 1991, most blasting the plan.

Gray said he urged county board members to back the plan and thus avoid what he saw as an inevitable tax increase.

Ultimately, the county board and planning commission approved the Atlantic Waste Disposal Landfill, which now operates round-the-clock, accepting trash from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, the District, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and North Carolina last year.

Gray has since left the Senate, announcing shortly after the landfill vote that he would not run again.

"I am not sure if I would have been reelected if I had chosen to run again," said Gray, 73, who cited his bout with prostate cancer at the time as the reason for his retirement.

James E. Belshan, a soil scientist from Sussex who was elected to the county board after helping lead the charge against the dump, said he still resents Gray's role.

"For generations, people have come to look to the Gray family to help to guide this county," Belshan said. "But in this instance, he decided to do what was in his best interest, and he left us with a trash heap that will linger on forever."

Metro Resource Director Margot Williams contributed to this report.

CASH FROM THE TRASH INDUSTRY

Over the last three years, the trash industry has contributed nearly $400,000 to Virginia candidates. Below are the top 10 contributors and recipients:

Contributors 1995-1998

Browning-Ferris Industries Inc. $97,190

Waste Management Inc. 63,425

Incendere Inc. ++54,917

USA Waste Services Inc. +30,150

Shoosmith Bros. Inc. ++39,607

Aegis Waste Solutions Inc. ++25,000

Sanifill Inc. + 16,625

   AAA Disposal Service              ++14,150

   Ogden Martin Systems Inc.            7,775

First Piedmont Corp. 6,400

   Top 10 total                      $355,239

   Total for industry             +++$396,904

   Recipients 1995-1998

   James S. Gilmore III (R) for governor             $100,232

   Commonwealth Victory Fund                       ++++40,325

   Mark L. Earley (R) for attorney general             35,400

   Donald S. Beyer Jr. (D) for governor                28,270

   Joint Republican Caucus                             26,150

   Former Del. Shirley F. Cooper (D)                   12,950

   Del. S. Chris Jones (R-Suffolk)                      6,317

   Sen. John Watkins (R-Richmond)                       5,050

   Del. C. Richard Cranwell (D-Roanoke)                 4,275

   L.F. Payne Jr. (D) for lieutenant governor           4,000

   + Has merged with Waste Management.

++Donations made by company or company's current or former executives

+++Total does not include contributions less than $100.

++++Democratic Party political action committee.

SOURCE: Virginia campaign finance records

Talking Trash

More than a dozen pieces of legislation have been introduced in Richmond during the last five years that would have increased oversight of the solid-waste industry or imposed stiffer restrictions on it. Most failed. During the same period, bills that expanded Virginia's landfill capacity or benefited the waste industry fared better. Below is the outcome of the bills presented:

1994

Defeated in House. Del. W. Tayloe Murphy Jr. (D-Westmoreland) proposed creating a "state strategic planning process" for eval-uating the need for landfills.

Indefinitely deferred. Del. Harvey B. Morgan (R-Gloucester) proposed requiring a local referendum for any commercial landfill that would import at least half of the trash.

Adopted. Sen. Virgil H. Goode Jr. (D-Rocky Mount) proposed requiring communities to hold a hearing before giving local approval to a landfill.

Bill died. Sen. Thomas K. Norment Jr.

(R-James City) proposed license fee on waste haulers based on volume.

1995

Adopted. Del. Shirley F. Cooper (D-Yorktown) proposed preventing local governments from setting up trash collection programs that drove private haulers out of business until

the haulers were given a payment equal to a year's revenue or a five-year advance notice.

Bill died. Del. Kenneth R. Melvin

(D-Portsmouth) proposed state review to ensure that before a landfill was built it did not "disproportionately impact minority

or economically disadvantaged communities."

Adopted. Del. W.W. "Ted" Bennett Jr. (D-Halifax) proposed that old landfills, which lacked liners to protect groundwater, con-tinue to operate so long as they added trash only to the top of the pile and did not expand over more land area.

1996

Bill died. Melvin proposed banning new landfill permits for operators who had a history of siting the landfills in areas that unjustly affected minority or poor communites.

Adopted. Murphy proposed fines of as much as $10,000 for operating a landfill or dump that violated state regulations or threatened public health.

1997

Adopted. Melvin proposed requiring local governments to hold at least one hearing and create a citizens advisory

group to review new landfill requests.

Died in committee. Sen. Emmett W. Hanger Jr. (R-Augusta) proposed requiring

a referendum where any large landfill was proposed. If voters rejected the proposed landfill, the state could still issue a permit.

Died in committee. Del. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath) proposed creating the Abandoned Waste Site Remediation Foundation to oversee cleanup of closed landfills that were harming the environment.

Adopted. Del. James H. Dillard II (R-Fairfax) proposed requiring a yearly state audit that listed the source and the

disposal site for trash disposed of in Virginia.

1998

Deferred until 1999. Hanger, Morgan and Del. George W. Grayson (D-James City) introduced bills encouraging Congress to allow states to regulate importation of out-of-state trash.

Indefinitely deferred. Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William) proposed col-lecting trash importation and exportation fees to cover environmental damage caused by landfills.

Ban deferred; restrictions adopted. Murphy and Sen. Henry L. Marsh III (D-Richmond) introduced two bills each to ban trash barges on the James River or impose new restrictions on them to ensure they do not leak or harm the environment.

Deferred. Sens. Charles R. Hawkins

(R-Pittsylvania), Malfourd W. "Bo" Trumbo

(R-Botetourt) and Jane H. Woods (R-Fairfax) propose requiring trucks and trailers that haul municipal solid waste to landfills be designed specifically for that purpose.

Credit: Washington Post Staff Writer