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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MAY 6, 2016
EPA’s involvement in What’s Upstream ran deep
EPA’s involvement
Agency helped
pressure state
lawmakers
for greater
regulation
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
A little more than a month
ago, What’s Upstream was an
obscure political advocacy cam-
paign backed by U.S. Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency
money, a Washington state
Indian tribe and a handful of
environmental groups.
Today, the campaign has
been condemned by one-third
of the U.S. House as an attack
on agriculture, and the inspector
general of the EPA has promised
to investigate whether it is a mis-
use of taxpayer money.
If it is, the Northwest Indian
Fisheries Commission may
have to repay the money and
could be cut off from receiv-
ing future grants. The commis-
sion funneled the EPA money
to the Swinomish tribe to fund
an advertising and letter-writing
campaign aimed at the Wash-
ington Legislature seeking man-
datory 100-foot buffer zones
between farms and rivers.
The website features a pho-
tograph — not taken in Wash-
ington — of cattle standing in a
river and salmon that apparently
had died after spawning, a natu-
ral occurrence. The implication
was that farming in Washington
state is not adequately regulated.
Wyoming property-rights
attorney Karen Budd-Falen,
who has followed the environ-
mental movement for years,
said she’s reviewed a lot of
EPA-funded projects, but noth-
ing quite like What’s Upstream.
“I have never seen anything
this bad,” she said, while tak-
ing her irst look at the What’s
Upstream website. “This is
really amazing.”
‘Take Action’
The website included a “Take
Action” button that allowed vis-
itors to send letters to Washing-
ton legislators urging the man-
datory buffer zones, which
promoters say would prevent
farm runoff from reaching riv-
ers. The letters made no mention
of EPA funding or involvement.
“To fund a program that
tries to inluence the state Leg-
islature, that I ind totally shock-
ing,” said Budd-Falen. “If that’s
the goal, I don’t believe it is a
legitimate goal.”
Swinomish tribal Chair-
man Brian Cladoosby said the
tribe’s goal is to draw attention
to water pollution that threatens
the tribe’s treaty rights. Stron-
ger federal and state laws are
needed, he said.
“At the end of the day, we
have to do what we think is right.
Courtesy of Save Family Farming
A billboard near Bellingham, Wash., promotes the What’s Upstream campaign funded by
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The billboard, and one like it in Olympia, has
been taken down.
We didn’t do anything wrong by
trying to educate the public on
agricultural practices,” he said.
“You call people out for pollu-
tion, and they’re going to react
like you’ve seen them react.”
The “Take Action” button has
been removed from the website,
but the controversy remains.
In addition to condemning
the campaign, some members of
Congress question whether lob-
bying laws that may carry ines
have been broken.
In the meantime, the EPA has
disassociated itself from What’s
Upstream, but members of Con-
gress want to know how deep
the agency’s involvement was
and how the agency will prevent
grants from being misused in the
future.
U.S. Sen. Deb Fisher,
R-Neb.,
confronted
EPA
Administrator Gina McCar-
thy about What’s Upstream at a
budget hearing in April.
“At what point did your
agency become aware of the
misuse of the EPA funds for
the What’s Upstream campaign
and what role did EPA have in
reviewing that billboard and
website?” Fischer asked.
McCarthy said she didn’t
have an exact date and that the
campaign was the result of a
“subcontract.”
However, EPA records
show the agency’s involvement
was hands-on. EPA spent more
than four years and more than a
half-million dollars directing the
campaign to lobby Washington
state legislators to impose agri-
culture rules tougher than allowed
under the federal Clean Water Act,
according to EPA records.
Grab attention
The campaign was designed
by a Seattle public relations irm
to grab attention. And it did.
As a result, the EPA has
stopped taking questions about
What’s Upstream, including an
important one: How much has
the agency spent?
?
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EPA records are incom-
plete. An estimate by the Capital
Press puts the igure at roughly
$570,000, though neither the
EPA, the isheries commission
nor the Swinomish tribe have
answered requests for a full
accounting.
The EPA responded to a
list of questions for this story
with a brief statement, saying
the agency expects the isher-
ies commission to cut the low
of money to the Swinomish
tribe and to review the tribe’s
actions. EPA declined to answer
follow-up questions. The isher-
ies commission also declined to
comment.
Some lawmakers — includ-
ing U.S. Senate Agriculture
Committee Chairman Pat Rob-
erts and Senate Environment
and Public Works Commit-
tee Chairman Jim Inhofe —
have compared EPA’s fund-
ing for What’s Upstream with
the “covert” campaign last year
to promote the Waters of the
United States rule.
In that case, the Government
Accountability Ofice faulted
the methods EPA used to rally
support for the controversial
rule, spreading messages via
social media and outside web-
sites without disclosing EPA’s
involvement.
What’s Upstream has some-
times not disclosed EPA fund-
ing on its materials. Billboards
that were erected in Bellingham
and Olympia made no mention
of the EPA’s involvement. The
billboards have now been taken
down, but for a time they over-
shadowed the website.
Roberts called them “mali-
cious,” and McCarthy said
they were the most “egregious”
aspect of What’s Upstream.
“I can’t believe two bill-
boards got that much attention,”
the tribe’s Cladoosby said. “We
didn’t see that coming at all.”
Besides the letter-writing
campaign and inadequate dis-
closure about EPA funding, the
content of the website and the
rest of the campaign has become
the issue.
“This is just a new low,”
said Washington state agricul-
ture lawyer Toni Meacham. “It’s
shocking to me our tax dollars
went for that.”
Corrective action?
The EPA initially defended
the campaign as “public educa-
tion” on Puget Sound ish recov-
ery, but in April, the agency
reversed course and blamed the
isheries commission and the
Swinomish tribe for misusing
EPA money on the campaign.
The EPA said it would take cor-
rective action.
However,
more
than
four weeks later, the What’s
Upstream website remains
online. Asked about the cam-
paign’s future, Cladoosby said,
“Stay tuned.”
The EPA’s McCarthy
assured the Senate Environment
and Public Works Committee in
April that her agency was “dis-
tressed by the use of the money
and the tone of that campaign.”
One year earlier, McCarthy
spent the afternoon with Swin-
omish tribal leaders, according
to EPA records and photographs
posted on the EPA website.
McCarthy met with the leaders
for 30 minutes and then went on
a 90-minute walking and boat-
ing tour of the Skagit River with
a group that included Cladoosby,
the tribe’s environmental policy
director Larry Wasserman, and
the EPA’s Northwest adminis-
trator, Dennis McLerran,
The meeting and tour were
closed to the press. An EPA
spokesman said the agency had
no information to indicate that
the What’s Upstream campaign
was discussed. Cladoosby said
McCarthy visited in response to
President Barack Obama’s call
for leaders in his administra-
tion to visit Indian Country. The
What’s Upstream campaign did
not come up, Cladoosby said.
Public records show the EPA
has been aware for several years
that the tribe hired Seattle pub-
lic relations irm Strategies 360
to develop a message and cam-
paign strategy.
Strategies 360 has ofices
in 10 states and the District of
Columbia and lists Shell Oil
Co., Starbucks and Microsoft
among its clients. Strategies 360
employees also spoke to report-
ers on behalf of central Wash-
ington dairies that were sued
over groundwater pollution in
2013 in what became the land-
mark Cow Palace Dairy case.
The EPA was kept informed
as the tribe recruited some of
agriculture’s sharpest critics as
partners and wanted the out-
come to, as the EPA records put
it, “increase the level of regula-
tory certainty.”
The EPA issued speciic
directions, including demands
for advertisements and the
placement of news stories,
which in turn did not disclose
EPA’s involvement.
The EPA also reviewed the
website, but did not prevent
What’s Upstream from adding
the “Take Action” button to send
letters to state legislators.
The EPA also received a mar-
keting report in the fall of 2014
from Strategies 360. The irm
reported that people were going
to the What’s Upstream website
as long as $1,000 a week was
being spent on advertising.
The EPA posted the reports
from the tribe’s Wasserman and
Strategies 360 online on the
agency’s Puget Sound Finan-
cial and Ecosystem Accounting
Tracking System.
According to the agency, the
system allows anyone — from
the White House to the press —
to monitor how EPA money is
being used in the Puget Sound.
EPA adds its expectations to the
report.
According to an EPA fact
sheet, the reports “will give EPA
and awardees the ability to tell a
story.” The reports, the fact sheet
states, “Will allow us to make a
strong case for additional Puget
Sound investments.”
Campaign’s nature
The campaign’s part-
ners include the environ-
mental groups Puget Sound-
keeper, Spokane Riverkeeper,
Western
Environmental
Law Center and the Center
for Environmental Law and
Policy.
The groups vigorously
defend the campaign, saying the
protests are the sound of an agri-
culture industry playing the part
of the wounded victim. “The
truth hurts sometimes,” Puget
Soundkeeper Executive Direc-
tor Chris Wilke said.
What’s Upstream angered
Washington farm groups only
partly because EPA funded it,
farm advocates say, adding that
the campaign’s line of attack —
that agriculture is “unregulated”
— is lat-out wrong and viliies
producers for water pollution
that’s the sum total of rural life
and urban development around
the Puget Sound.
“No one is disputing water
quality is an issue that needs
to be addressed,” said Gerald
Baron, director of Save Family
Farming, a farmer-funded group
formed this year to push back
against agriculture’s critics in
northwestern Washington.
“It’s not honest to say it’s
not an anti-farming campaign
because it blames all the water
issues on farmers,” he said.
Cladoosby acknowledged
that it may overstate the case to
say agriculture is unregulated.
“It’s possibly not 100 per-
cent true, not 100 percent lie,”
he said.
Campaign’s claims
The What’s Upstream bill-
board image turned out to be a
picture from a stock photo ser-
vice labeled, “Amish Country
cows in stream.”
A similar photo on the What’s
Upstream website shows cows
standing in a bucolic stream.
The photo is also available
from a stock photo service and
was taken by a British nature
photographer.
Asked where the photo was
taken, the tribe’s Wasserman,
who’s in charge of the website,
said he didn’t know.
Another photo meant to link
farming to dead ish showed a
spawned out salmon.
Wasserman and the environ-
mental groups have defended
the website as factual, saying
links back up the claims.
For example, the website
states: “In Washington, over
three-quarters of state water pol-
lution clean-up funds were used
to clean up waters contaminated
by agriculture between 2005
and 2013.”
The statement links to
a Washington Department
of Ecology report on feder-
ally funded pollution-control
projects.
The website claim appears
to be based on the percentage
of projects funded in eastern
Washington.
Actually, 46 percent of the
funds statewide were spent on
agriculture-related projects. In
the Puget Sound area, where the
Swinomish tribe is based, more
money was spent to control
urban sources of pollution.
Asked about the website’s
images and some of the claims,
Wasserman responded by
emailing a report issued in April
by the Western Environmen-
tal Law Center. The 151-page
report presents a case for stricter
regulations on agriculture.
The report includes a com-
mentary by Wasserman on the
importance of streamside veg-
etation buffers but does not
answer questions about What’s
Upstream.
Inordinate
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Follow reporter Kyle Spurr on his 9-1-What? Twitter watch, where a few of
the sometimes head-scratching calls to area dispatch take center stage. The full
feed is at www.twitter.com/9_1_WHAT.
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