From: cberlet@igc.apc.org (NLG Civil Liberties Committee)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: Re: Wise Use in Northeast (anti-Green)
Date: 13 Dec 92 22:24:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #R:cdp:1425500034:cdp:1425500039:000:33524
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!cberlet    Dec 13 14:24:00 1992


/* Written  2:21 pm  Dec 13, 1992 by cberlet in igc:publiceye */
The Scent of Opportunity:
A Survey of the Wise Use/Property Rights 
Movement in New England 

by William Kevin Burke

December 12, 1992

SITUATION BY STATE

Vermont


 On June 7, 1992, at the Killington Ski Area, 
the Vermont property rights movement hosted what 
was intended to be their largest and most 
impressive rally to date. The group that held the 
rally is called "Citizens for Property Rights." 
The Spring 1992 issue of their newsletter, 
Vermont Property Rights News, was full of pleas 
for the membership to turn out in full force for 
the "election year kick off rally." 

"Our enemies are waiting for us to stumble. Or 
just quit. The press is watching. If this rally 
fizzles property rights will suffer. Your rights. 
We need you." Killington Ski Area provided the 
space for the rally along with a special room 
rate for attendees. The lobby was decorated for 
the occasion with twenty paper effigies dangling 
from the ceiling by ropes around their necks. 
Each effigy bore the name of a political figure 
that CPR wants ousted in the coming elections, 
including Democratic Gov. Howard Dean.

"There is the scent of a lion in the political 
arena," said David Edson, CPR's full time 
lobbyist at Vermont's State House. "And that lion 
is John McClaughery." The 150 rally attendees 
cheered Edson, Republican gubernatorial candidate 
McClaughery and Nadine Bailey--who flew in from 
California to tell how efforts to preserve the 
northern spotted owl destroyed her family's 
livelihood. But after the cheering had subsided 
and the nooses had been cut down, it was 
debatable whether CPR had really advanced its cause.

"Tactics like those unveiled at last Sunday's 
property rights bash at the Killington Ski Area 
can only undermine [the property right's 
movement's] credibility and make every CPR 
argument sound like a self-serving, hot-headed 
one," said an editorial in the Rutland Sunday Herald.

James Douglas, Secretary of State and one of 
three Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate 
seat currently held by Patrick J. Leahy, attended 
the Killington rally and said he was "surprised" 
by the "unnecessary" tactics CPR employed. 
Douglas has so far shielded CPR from scrutiny 
under Vermont's laws governing lobbying 
activities. The group claims to be exempt from 
reporting lobbying activities because it spends 
less than five hundred dollars on lobbying per 
year. Yet environmentalists who monitor the State 
House report that Edson is virtually a full time lobbyist.

In fact, claiming not to be "slick, high paid 
lobbyists," unlike the employees of non-profit 
environmental organizations that faithfully 
follow reporting guidelines, is a regional 
property rights tactic, part of the "just plain 
folks" strategy originally advocated by Ron 
Arnold and his backers in the oil and mining industries.

Douglas declined to demand more information on 
CPR's lobbying activities and funding when 
requested to do so by a group of State 
legislators who had been targeted by CPR for 
removal from office. Douglas's protection has 
been the key to CPR's strategy of insisting they 
are not lobbyists, although their organization 
devotes practically all its energy to overturning 
environmental protection and planning laws, 
especially Vermont's Act 200, which encourages 
comprehensive town planning and links it to a 
regional planning process. 

CPR claims to be the vanguard of a grassroots 
rebellion to restore Vermont to traditions of 
frugality, freedom from government interference, 
and respect for constitutional rights. But it is 
equally accurate to characterize it as a group of 
disgruntled would-be developers anxious to cover 
their home state with condos, vacation homes, and 
strip malls.

CPR activist Dennis Carver of East Montpelier has 
said that property rights are so absolute that he 
should be allowed to build a nuclear power plant 
on his land, regardless of what his neighbors 
think. The Carver family reportedly would like to 
subdivide their family's farm. David Edson is a 
carpenter and home builder. Douglas Nelson of 
Landowners United, an outgrowth of CPR, hopes to 
build a mall near Newport, Vermont, to lure 
shoppers from Canada.

Landowners United was formed to convince 
landowners to post their land with no trespassing 
signs as a protest against Act 200. This was a 
highly successful tactic. The Vermont Association 
of Snow Travelers (VAST), a snowmobilers' 
organization that depends on the permission of 
private landholders to keep open a wide network 
of trails in northern Vermont, caved in to the 
pressure and elected Ed Eilertson, a staunch CPR 
ally, as president. Environmentalists had 
formerly considered VAST an organization that 
shared some common goals, especially open space 
preservation. Now Eilertson, who has passed out 
bumper stickers reading, "Plant a Tree Hugger," 
uses VAST to lobby for CPR's agenda.

At present, CPR is focused on repealing ACT 200. 
But their literature suggests that ACT 250, a 
system of development regulation that has been 
operating for over a decade, is next on their 
list. Laws protecting wetlands and promoting 
strict air and water pollution standards are also 
CPR targets.

The most prominent leader of Vermont's property 
rights movement is gubernatorial candidate John 
McClaughery, a Republican State Senator from the 
"Northeast Kingdom," three counties in northern 
Vermont noted for their traditional Yankee 
independence. McClaughery can claim some credit 
for aiding the rise of the New Right. McClaughery 
worked on Ronald Reagan's political campaigns, 
including Reagan's 1980 presidential race, and 
was rewarded with a job in the White House when 
Reagan was elected President. He left that job 
though, reportedly in disgust at what he 
perceived as the overly conciliatory policies of 
the early Reagan administration. 

State Senator McClaughery hopes his gubernatorial 
candidacy will push Vermont's Republican Party, 
which has a long moderate conservationist 
tradition, to the right. Last year McClaughery 
introduced a law that would have designated many 
government actions to protect the environment 
(such as denying a permit for an unsound 
development project) a "taking," thus requiring 
monetary compensation under the U.S. 
Constitution. Dubbed the "pout and pay bill" 
because it would have allowed developers to bill 
the state government if any agency blocked an 
unrealistic or illegal project, it failed to pass 
by only one vote in the Vermont House.

McClaughery is on the editorial board of the 
Washington Times. This indicates at the very 
least that he has made a personal peace with the 
anti-democratic extremism of the Reverend Sun 
Myung Moon's Unification Church, which owns the 
paper and largely dictates its editorial 
policies. McClaughery enjoys his reputation as an 
intellectual maverick and has authored a book 
calling for a return to something called "shire 
democracy," a kind of libertarian utopia of small 
hamlets and honest, independent property owners.

"[Property rights advocates] have a great rapport 
with the rural town meetings," said one 
environmentalist. Other activists suggest that at 
least some of this rapport is based on 
intimidation. Paul Daniels is a wealthy farmer 
and one of the original CPR organizers in the 
Northeast Kingdom. Daniels made a great deal of 
money by attaining a semi-monopoly on pulpwood 
sales in his area. Woodlot owners and independent 
loggers were forced to work through Daniels, who 
held contracts for delivering wood to pulp mills 
in the region. Daniels has also served as an 
advisor to a local bank and was in a position to 
exert influence over loan decisions.

Daniels threw his considerable local influence 
behind successful efforts to force the town of 
Albany to withdraw from the Act 200 planning 
process. He has also opposed efforts to improve 
local schools. Daniels has told rural town 
meetings that unless they vote to block efforts 
to promote regional planning and property tax 
reform, "you won't be able to paint your chicken 
coop." Two other of the Northeast Kingdom's other 
original CPR activists (the group was born there) 
are Roger and Jo Sweatt, a husband and wife team 
of realtors.

It is perhaps worth noting that the public policy 
gap that allows Daniels and his fellow property 
rights advocates to gain a following is real. 
Wise Users often accuse environmentalists of 
elitism. While this claim most likely originated 
in the psychological insecurities of college 
drop-out Ron Arnold (who often rails against 
"environmentalists with Ph.D.'s"), it contains a 
grain of truth. Environmentalists are used to 
fighting their battles through environmental 
impact statements and lawsuits. The homespun 
counterattack of the Wise Use advocates has in 
many instances left environmentalists unprepared. 
Environmental organizers in Vermont and elsewhere 
have devoted little energy to convincing rural 
residents that sustainable development and 
rational democratic planning processes are 
possible and preferable to the boom and bust 
cycles of an economy entirely dependent on 
unregulated resort development. Essentially, the 
choice facing many people in the Big North is 
whether their children will be able to work in a 
sustainable forest economy or clean condominiums 
at minimum wage.

Unfortunately the Wise Use and property rights 
advocates seem to have, for the moment, distorted 
the debate on these issues with their threats 
that all reform will lead to "government land 
grabs. It is doubtful that most Vermont 
residents, or even most Vermont small property 
owners, want to see their entire state developed 
without any government planning or regulation 
whatsoever. Nationally, lobbying for limiting 
government's ability to protect land under the 
guise of "property rights" is conducted by 
national organizations of realtors and 
contractors. In Vermont this lobbying is 
conducted by realtors, developers, and others 
with a fiscal interest in limiting and preventing 
environmental protection and land use planning.


 V


 Maine


 Just prior to the October 1991 hearing on the 
Northern Forest Lands Council (NFLC) cited 
earlier, Jonathan Malmude, a property rights 
activist and professor at St. Joseph's College in 
York County, wrote an op-ed article for the 
Bangor Daily News in which he claimed that the 
"super-regulatory NFLC environment could have a 
chilling effect on ministers, teachers, or 
townspeople who are outspoken on civic issues." 
This suggestion, linking a state and federal 
government-led effort to promote debate about the 
economic future of the Big North to gag orders on 
activist preachers, seems carefully designed to 
appeal to the strong Christian fundamentalist 
traditions of rural Maine. Bangor is generally 
considered the center of those traditions.

Maine's property rights movement is as active, 
energetic, and successful as Vermont's, but more 
splintered. The primary Wise Use organization is 
the Maine Conservation Rights Institute (MECRI) 
in Lubec, Maine, which grew out of the Washington 
County Alliance, a group that had opposed the 
preservation of scenic areas in Washington County.

When contacted by a researcher, a MECRI 
spokesperson (who chose not to be identified) 
claimed the group was funded by $100 membership 
fees and additional gifts from its over four 
hundred members. Contacted later, Robert Voight, 
president of the organization, repeated the claim 
that the group was funded completely by 
membership fees, "or whatever the membership 
wants to donate," adding, "We're a grassroots 
group." 

But a MECRI filing with the IRS indicated that 
the group expected to receive grants and gifts 
totaling $134,707 against $13,000 in membership 
fees in 1991 and $118,456 against $28,000 in 
membership fees in 1992. This would mean that in 
1991, MECRI expected to have 130 dues paying 
members contribute on average an additional $1000 
per member, and in 1992, expected 280 dues paying 
members to contribute on average an additional 
$400 per member. This is an unlikely level of 
generosity and suggests additional funding 
sources to those claimed by MECRI. Voight 
declined to furnish any additional details 
regarding actual funding, saying those matters 
were private. 

Several environmentalists who have been involved 
in conflicts with the Maine Wise Use movement 
describe the movement with the phrase, "I know 
what they are against; I'm not sure what they are 
for." This perception mirrors the overall 
negative style of the national Wise Use movement 
and its reaction against environmentalism. Beyond 
clearcutting old growth forests, revising 
wetlands regulations, and letting dirt bikes race 
through endangered ecosystems, the movement has 
little positive vision to offer despite its 
relentless rhetoric about promoting appropriate 
environmental protection. Voight confirmed that 
MECRI is a member of the Alliance for America.

In 1991, Ted Johnston of Maine's Forest Products 
Industry Council spoke at MECRI's annual 
conference. In 1992 the featured speaker was Ron 
Arnold. But the hearings on the Northern Forest 
Lands Council remain the watermark for the Maine 
property rights movement's influence. Those 
hearings attracted a wide variety of property 
rights activists. These included Linda Bean, 
granddaughter of L.L. Bean and former funder of 
the Hannibal Hamlin Institute, an earlier 
property rights organization that fought a bond 
issue to fund a state program called Land for 
Maine's Future. Bean announced to the media 
assembled at the hearing that she was running for 
the U.S. House of Representatives. She later won 
the Republican primary for District One in 
Southwestern Maine but lost in the general 
election. MECRI, Malmude, and the John Birch 
Society were also at the hearing, as was someone 
passing out copies of The New Federalist, 
newspaper of the Lyndon LaRouche organization.

The New Federalist has run numerous articles 
alleging that environmental activists are part of 
a terrorist conspiracy to ruin the economy. The 
LaRouchites claim this conspiracy by 
environmentalists to de-industrialize the country 
can be traced backward through the World Wildlife 
Fund, George Bernard Shaw, Aristotle, and the 
Babylonian matriarchy.


 VI


 Massachusetts


 So far, Wise Use/property rights organizing in 
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut has 
been less widespread and less successful than in 
Maine and Vermont. Eric Veyhl, who maintains dual 
residences in Washington County, Maine, and 
Concord, Massachusetts, tried to lead an effort 
to block a Park Service study of the Concord 
River system outside Boston. His effort failed 
and the study is proceeding. 

The property rights movement did win one 
substantial victory in the southern Berkshires of 
Massachusetts. This year a property rights group 
called Friends of the Rivers managed to convince 
three Massachusetts towns to withdraw their 
approval of a Park Service plan to study the 
upper reaches of the Farmington River for 
possible inclusion in the federal Wild and Scenic 
Rivers program.

Friends of the Rivers relied on Don Rupp of New 
York and the Alliance for America for strategic 
guidance. Rupp has long been opposed to Wild and 
Scenic designation along the upper Delaware 
River. He claims that Wild and Scenic designation 
is an inevitable prelude to the establishment of 
a national park, that Wild and Scenic designation 
causes homes to be bulldozed, landowners to be 
bought off their land, and property values to 
fall. None of this has happened along the upper 
Delaware. In fact Rupp, who in 1981 lost his gas 
station for failing to pay state sales tax, 
currently earns his living as a real estate agent 
selling homes and land that have appreciated in 
value as a result of Wild and Scenic designation 
of the upper Delaware.

"Rupp obscured the real issue," said Gary 
Pontier, editor of The River Reporter, a 
newspaper based in the Upper Delaware Valley. No 
program, federal or otherwise, is perfect. 
Because of Rupp's domination and disruption of 
the debate, the real potential problems for 
riverbank landholders from Wild and Scenic 
designation were never discussed in Rupp's home 
region. "The cruelest thing [Rupp] has done is 
that he's stirred up people saying that property 
values will drop." Pontier noted that there is a 
problem along the Upper Delaware for small 
landholders and farmers who do not wish to sell 
their property but face rising real estate taxes 
as their land's paper value increases. Such 
landholders are often forced to sell off chunks 
of property to meet their tax burden, thus 
feeding the real estate market and by 
implication, Don Rupp.

Rupp made other statements that mislead people 
and inflame fears. Rupp reportedly told residents 
along the Farmington River that the Wild and 
Scenic designation was being pushed by 
legislators paid off by the environmental groups. 
He failed to mention that Chuck Cushman of the 
National Inholders Association had convinced the 
Park Service to allow the towns along the Upper 
Delaware to hire their own planners to come up 
with riverbank zoning plans that would comply 
with the Wild and Scenic plan. Rupp told one 
Massachusetts audience that they should not 
participate in the planning process in any way 
because this would allow the federal government 
and its behind-the-scenes allies, the 
conservation groups, to exercise complete control 
over their land. 

Friends of the Rivers (FOR) formed to oppose the 
Farmington River Wild and Scenic study. Prominent 
members included the Campetti family of 
Sandisfield, proprietors of an oil business and 
an off road vehicle dealership. The Campettis 
recently turned a wetland along the Farmington 
into a landfill for roadway and construction 
debris. Another FOR stalwart is Francis Deming, 
who operates his over one hundred acres of 
property in Tolland as a pay-as-you-dump waste 
disposal site. 

Certainly no one can object to local business 
people banding together to express their will on 
an issue they deem important. But Friends of the 
Rivers hewed to the familiar Wise Use/property 
rights pattern of spreading horror stories and 
disinformation. FOR literature claimed at various 
times that Wild and Scenic would mean the land 
along the river would automatically become a 
wildlife refuge, that the federal government 
would impose strict zoning along the river, and 
that a long list of businesses in the affected 
towns would be closed. FOR also dutifully 
repeated Rupp's claim that Wild and Scenic 
designation devalues property. None of those 
statements was true.

FOR hung a poster in the center of Sandisfield 
claiming that Robert Tarasuk, the town's 
representative on the Wild and Scenic Study 
Committee, was a paid federal agent. Their 
evidence was a copy of Tarasuk's resume which 
revealed that over a decade ago, Tarasuk had a 
summer job with the Bureau of Land Management. 
"There is no better tactic than to threaten 
someone's land," Tarasuk said. "Get somebody who 
lives on their land and that's all they have and 
then tell them that the government is coming to 
take it. Fear works. The Alliance for America 
knows this and I believe that they coach [local 
groups]," he said. "Your land has been stolen," 
read a FOR flier distributed along the 
Farmington. 

At one public forum in Otis, Massachusetts, Rupp 
and John Conner of the Alliance for America 
represented FOR. Dave Howard, president of 
Alliance for America, was also in the audience. 
Conner was also a vocal advocate for Florida 
developer Andrew DeLillo's proposal to build a 
giant landfill in nearby Hinsdale, Massachusetts. 
DeLillo's proposal was defeated when the people 
of the town banded together and convinced the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts to declare the site 
of the proposed landfill an Area of Critical 
Environmental Concern (ACEC). Conner has since 
formed a group called ACEC Inholders to lobby 
against the state program. Conner's current 
project is an effort to site a waste disposal 
facility in the Berkshires.

Despite their financial interests in preventing 
environmental protection and their reliance on 
misinformation and character smears, FOR was able 
to destroy confidence in the National Park 
Service along the Farmington. "Their message was 
you can't trust those [Park Service] bastards," 
the Farmington River Park Service project manager said.


 XI


 Connecticut 


 Friends of the River was not so successful 
when they tried to organize opposition to Wild 
and Scenic designation along the lower reaches of 
the Farmington River in northwest Connecticut. 
This was due in no small part to the fact that 
Connecticut residents of the Farmington River 
Valley have seen three valleys flooded to provide 
drinking water for Hartford, Connecticut. The 
Farmington River Watershed Association (FRWA), a 
river protection group founded in 1953, was able 
to counter FOR claims of "land grabs" and 
"preservationist lock-ups" of resources with the 
facts about Wild and Scenic designation.

Along the Farmington, FOR's main tool for 
inflaming citizens' fears was a videotaped film 
documentary about Park Service preservation 
efforts in the Cuyahoga River Valley in Ohio. 
That film, which was later adapted for the PBS 
series Frontline, documents an aggressive Park 
Service land acquisition program in that region 
during the early 1970s. It is worth noting that 
the film contains some distortions, such as not 
mentioning that one of the primary examples of a 
"victimized landholder," Leonard Stein-Sapir, was 
a man who bought undeveloped property in the 
region after the Park Service announced its plans 
to acquire land. He then subdivided the land into 
residential lots and sold it to the Park Service 
for $248,250. Nevertheless, he appears in the 
film as the selfless hero of the landholders 
victimized by the Park Service.

The Park Service project manager for the 
Farmington River did admit that the agency has in 
the past used a "top-down" management approach 
that did not take individual landholders into 
account. The structure of the Farmington project 
is meant to be an early example of a new model 
for providing rivers with federal Wild and Scenic 
protection while local control is retained.

This model has worked, if not perfectly, in New 
York along the Upper Delaware. Rising real estate 
values there (now in a cyclical decline due to 
the national recession) provide Don Rupp with his 
living. Wild and Scenic designation provides 
residents of the Upper Delaware Valley with the 
security of knowing that, if New York City tries 
to flood their homes for a reservoir, the federal 
government will stand in the way of any dam 
project and force the rigorous study of any 
diversion schemes.

Wild and Scenic designation allows federal 
control only over the waters of the river. 
Riverbanks remain under local jurisdiction, 
though towns must formulate zoning plans that 
will protect a buffer zone, usually about one 
hundred feet wide, along the banks in order to 
qualify for the Wild and Scenic program.

By carefully explaining the details of local 
control to area landholders worried by FOR's 
false claims of land grabs, Farmington River 
Watershed Association members prevented FOR's 
rumors of "federal land grabs" from taking hold.

The Wise Use/property rights activists had one 
major success in Connecticut. Their distortions 
of the meaning and effect of Wild and Scenic 
designation significantly influenced coverage of 
the issue by Joseph A. O'Brien of the Hartford Courant.

Here is the conclusion of O'Brien's article about 
a town meeting in Tolland, Massachusetts, which 
voted to abandon the Wild and Scenic study: 


>>   Part of Tolland borders the Colebrook 
>>   river reservoir, which covers the area where the 
>>   village of Colebrook River once stood.

>>   "I'm sure you're aware of the town of Colebrook River 
>>   that was wiped out," said Julian C. Work, 
>>   chairman of Tolland's planning board. "Anything 
>>   that smacks of that sort of control I'm against."
 
>>   "I hope this sends a message to other 
>>   federal protectionist programs," said Joseph J. 
>>   Clark III of Tolland, spokesman for a group 
>>   opposed to the designation.

>>   "We want local control, we want to make 
>>   our own decisions. We've got problems 
>>   with federal decisions," Stephen 
>>   Palmer, a machinist from Tolland, said. "People 
>>   say we don't understand. We do understand. We 
>>   feel confident with our own decisions."           

                     Hartford Courant 
                     3/8/92  

Federal Wild and Scenic River designation is 
primarily a means for providing protection for 
scenic riverways, and the towns, businesses, and 
homes that lie along them from precisely the sort 
of large scale reservoir project that flooded the 
town of Colebrook River.

O'Brien's article allowed the property rights 
advocates to turn the facts of the Farmington 
situation on their head--without any substantive 
reply from a river protection advocate.

In light of Wise Use/property rights movement 
founder Ron Arnold's dictum that "facts don't 
matter, in politics perception is reality," and 
the relentless consistency of property rights 
movement tactics across New England, O'Brien's 
story should forewarn New England's journalists 
to do extra homework on the details of 
politically charged land use and environmental 
issues when dealing with local examples of the 
national property rights movement.


 VII


 New Hampshire


 At the recent Wise Use gathering in Reno, 
Nevada, a glossy pamphlet was distributed that 
promoted the Alliance for America. After a short 
description of the Alliance's birth at a "fly in 
for freedom" in September 1991, the pamphlet goes 
on to list the group's goals and ask for 
contributions in categories ranging from "patron" 
($10,000+) to "individual/family" ($15). First 
among the goals listed is: "Achieve 
representation in all 50 states." Other goals 
include: "Create a positive public identity," and 
"Become a voice in the 1992 political campaign." 
That pamphlet, which reflects the Alliance's 
perfectly legitimate desire to form a lobbying 
alliance among large businesses, wealthy 
individuals, and people of moderate means to 
oppose environmental regulation and the end of 
federal subsidies for mining and grazing on 
public lands, has everything to do with a series 
of events along the Pemigewasset, a scenic river 
that flows from the White Mountains of New 
Hampshire down into the Merrimack River Valley.

Ed Clark, a local businessman and owner of 
several hydroelectric facilities, had long wanted 
to erect a dam at Livermore Falls in the town of 
Campton, New Hampshire. Livermore Falls is a 
scenic area where the river drops through a gorge 
carved through reddish stone. A small beach just 
above the falls provides residents of Campton and 
Plymouth, New Hampshire, with a place to sunbathe 
and relax. The ruins of a mill and an iron bridge 
that spans the gorge below the falls remind 
visitors of the region's industrial past. Town 
officials also know the falls as a prime place 
for thrill seekers to drink a little too much and 
kill themselves jumping off the rocks or climbing 
on the rusted spans of the "Pumpkinseed" bridge 
(so-called because of its shape, a slender 
pointed oval perched atop the gorge's granite outcrops).

Clark's plan would have flooded the falls and the 
beach, and provided electricity three or four 
months a year. Even opponents of the dam 
acknowledged that it was a sensitively planned 
project that would have been both a 
historically-minded reconstruction and a working 
hydroelectric facility. Two groups formed around 
the dam project. One, which eventually became the 
New Hampshire Landholder's Alliance, favored the 
dam. Its primary early leaders were Don and 
Cheryl Johnson. Cheryl Johnson was a partner in a 
local printing business and her husband Don was 
an employee of Ed Clark. Opposed to the dam 
project was the Pemigewasset River Council, 
headed by Patricia Schlesinger.

At New Hampshire state legislative hearings, 
people who seek to testify sign cards indicating 
their position. These cards allow the 
representatives running the hearing to organize 
and document the presentations. At a hearing on 
the dam project in February 1991, Ed Clark's 
allies produced over eight hundred of these cards 
as evidence the public wanted the dam. It turned 
out the cards had not been issued by the state, 
but were privately printed copies. Moreover, New 
Hampshire state legislator Mary Anne Lewis had 
her staff conduct a quick phone survey, and now 
estimates that two-thirds of the cards bore the 
names of people who had no memory of signing 
anything related to the river project.

Clark's dam project was essentially killed when 
the Pemigewasset was enrolled in a State of New 
Hampshire river management program. The New 
Hampshire Landholder's Alliance (NHLA) 
incorporated as a non-profit organization and 
began distributing literature opposing river 
protection and environmentalism in general. Bill 
Lane, manager of the Campton Sand and Gravel 
Company, also became active in the organization. 
Jerri Ballou, another early NHLA activist, 
apparently dropped out of the movement after she 
was finally able to sell her riverfront land to 
the New Hampshire Land Conservation Investment Program.

NHLA focused its opposition on an ongoing study 
aimed at enrolling the Pemigewasset in the 
federal Wild and Scenic Rivers program. Not 
surprisingly Don Rupp and David Howard of the 
Alliance for America brought their message to the 
region at forums sponsored by the NHLA. According 
to observers at the two forums, public 
attendance, aside from the core membership of 
NHLA and members of the Pemigewasset River 
Council, was sparse: about twenty at one forum 
and nine at the other. The NHLA newsletter 
reported the combined attendance as nearly two hundred.

The low attendance at the NHLA forums was 
preceded by profuse amounts of literature 
distributed throughout local communities 
proclaiming familiar warnings of the perils of 
the Wild and Scenic Rivers program. Since Cheryl 
Johnson started printing and distributing the 
Alliance For America's Alliance News, she has 
reportedly made plans to form her own printing 
company. Johnson earlier had asked the Wild and 
Scenic Study Committee, on which she serves, to 
change the locations of two meetings to Campton 
because she was planning to buy Campton printing 
and could not spare the time to drive to the 
meetings. The committee agreed, but Johnson still 
missed the meetings. She now reportedly has the 
contract to provide all of Alliance for America's 
publications and literature. 

In effect, the NHLA seems to be funded directly 
by the national Alliance for America through 
Cheryl Johnson's business ventures. There is 
obviously nothing wrong with the national 
Alliance for America creating a "grassroots" 
group to spread the bad word about the Park 
Service. But the reliance upon Don Rupp, who 
routinely tells blatant falsehoods about the Park 
Service, and the NHLA's concentration of people 
with a financial interest in battling river 
protection should caution against taking NHLA's 
claims at face value. Nor does David Howard work 
to clarify complex issues. His main rhetorical 
tactic is to lump all government land and water 
protection programs into one category, as 
"threats to property rights." This is an 
effective tactic for manipulating media coverage, 
since people who question Howard's assumptions 
find their arguments reduced to one line 
responses that environmental issues are "more 
complex" than his videos about spotted owls 
versus loggers suggest. (For an example see 
"Landowner: People Belong in Environmental 
Picture" the Manchester, NH, Union Leader, 
3/28/92 ).

As this report was being completed, Gary Weiner, 
the Park Service employee in charge of the 
Pemigewasset River Wild and Scenic Study, led a 
canoe ride down the river to survey various 
scenic features of the river. Cheryl Johnson had 
been invited as a member of the committee, but 
after receiving the invitation she scheduled an 
NHLA fundraising auction for that day. But her 
spirit, and apparently the fruits of her printing 
press, accompanied the trip. All along the route 
of the canoe trip were signs proclaiming, "Go 
Away Park Service," "No Wild and Scenic," and "Go 
Away Gary." When the canoe trip reached its 
destination a parked bulldozer was blocking their 
taking-out point.

The NHLA, like every other property rights group 
presented in this report, displays no interest in 
promoting debate or public education. While 
providing information tailored to advance one's 
public affairs agenda is perfectly acceptable in 
a democracy, flat-out lying is not. A movement 
that combines the routine use of falsehood, an 
aggressive and intimidating style of discourse, 
and the careful concealment of its own financial 
interests in manipulating public opinion deserves 
more complete scrutiny from the press and public 
officials than the property rights movement has 
so far received.
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,soc.politics