- Community Says No, Maxxam You Cannot Buy Our Election!
July 1, 2004
Nine months after Pacific Lumber asked the court to throw out the fraud case against them, Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Christopher Wilson on April 30 rejected PL's motion to toss the case. Readers will remember that shortly after Humboldt DA Paul Gallegos filed the fraud suit in February 2003, a recall campaign against him was launched, underwritten by Maxxam/PL. Before the campaign was over, Maxxam/PL had sunk over a quarter million dollars into a mud-slinging campaign, but their bid to unseat this duly-elected official for the high crime of criticizing the corporation failed. In a March election, the people of Humboldt county voted overwhelmingly to keep Gallegos in office.
While the judge allowed the case to move forward, he denied requests from the District Attorney to place an injunction on logging operations and denied restitution payments related to the roughly $300 million Maxxam made from state and federal governments in the 1999 Headwaters deal.
Gallegos sued Pacific Lumber in February 2003, alleging the company both concealed data and submitted false data during the 1999 Headwaters deal negotiations about the likelihood of landslides on terrain they might log. Essentially, PL claimed in its EIR document that 15% of landslides in a watershed occurred during recent logging, when in fact over 60% resulted from current logging practices. (It has been their argument recently that they cannot be blamed for devastating slides and siltation because those are the result of "legacy logging" and they do better now.) The false calculation netted them a rate of cut that has since led to major damage: the once-thriving salmon runs in the Elk River, running through PL lands have spiraled steeply downward. The DA maintains that PL was able to cut an additional 40 million board feet than it should have, had legitimate data been reviewed by scientists. The case seeks millions of dollars in civil penalties. Under Judge Wilson's ruling, the DA must rewrite and refile the case within 30 days.
Why did they lie?
In August 1998, Maxxam mortgaged all of Pacific Lumber's timberlands to bondholders, committing PL to a rate of harvest that has already liquidated nearly all of PL's sawlog timber to finance the debt, siphoning hundreds of millions in profits to Houston's Maxxam Corp.
Prior to refinancing, independent government scientists warned that PL's rate of logging would ruin five watersheds in Humboldt County (Elk River, Freshwater, Bear, Jordan and Stitz Creeks), cause flooding, damage habitat and property, threaten health and safety, and prevent watershed recovery, violating state water laws. The DA charged that to get around these laws, PL knowingly submitted incorrect landslide data to regulators in order to maintain the high harvest rates required for the refinancing.
Some of the money Maxxam/PL poured into the effort to unseat Gallegos was used for slick ads. One linked Gallegos to those tree-sitters coming to Humboldt from foreign places (one mailer has a pair of bare feet sticking out of shredded jeans, hanging off a piece of plywood, proclaiming Gallegos was "spending thousands of our tax dollars to side with illegal treesitters." Another implied that Gallegos hangs out with felons and is soft on crime, even falsely using a child molestation case to smear his reputation. At the same time, Gallegos' family home was twice broken into and confidential documents were stolen from his office.
But it didn't work and the people spoke loud and clear. You have to wonder if the judge waited till after the election was over to make his ruling. This case will still need to muster significant support, particularly because the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors prevented Gallegos from bringing a major private law firm on board.Stay tuned.
