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Hurwitz
v. Gallegos
by KEITH EASTHOUSE
It is a sign, perhaps, of PL
fatigue that the company's recent bankrolling of the effort to
recall District Attorney Paul Gallegos -- to the tune of $70,000
shelled out since October -- hasn't created more of a stir locally.
Here we have a company owned by a wheeler-dealer from Texas trying
to oust a publicly elected official, an official who is suing
the wheeler-dealer's company for fraud, and the response seems
to be a giant, "What else is new?"
Maybe more people are angry
than is apparent. Or maybe it's the zeitgeist. We live
in a time when the president of the United States misleads the
American public to justify a war in the Middle East and nobody
seems to care. Meantime, an action movie star ousts the governor
of California less than a year into his second term and everyone
applauds. Why shouldn't Charles Hurwitz try to run Gallegos out
of office to avoid being taken to court? Brazenness is in. Playing
by the rules is for wimps.
Hurwitz' Pacific Lumber, it
is safe to say, has never been known for playing by the rules.
The take-no-prisoners approach was on display from the beginning,
in the mid-1980s, when Hurwitz -- up to his neck at the time
in the savings and loan scandals -- snatched the company away
from the Murphy family in a hostile takeover.
Then came the near tripling
of the timber cut; the raiding of the employee pension fund;
the "Thanksgiving Day Massacre" of 1992, when marbled
murrelet survey documents were forged so the company could log
ancient redwoods along Owl Creek; the hundreds of violations
of state logging regulations during the 1990s, which ultimately
led the California Department of Forestry to suspend Pacific
Lumber's timber license; the burying of the town of Stafford
in a debris torrent on New Year's day in 1997; the 1999 Headwaters
deal, in which Hurwitz persuaded the state and federal governments
to pay him nearly $500 million for redwoods that he couldn't
legally cut; Julia Butterfly Hill; the fight for the Mattole;
the ongoing battles in the Freshwater and Elk watersheds.
No wonder everyone is numb.
No wonder no one wants to hear about it anymore. No wonder no
one talks about all those logging trucks brimming with narrow
redwoods coming down off PL land.
"That's the future they're
carrying away," Eureka attorney Bill Bertain said not long
ago. He's probably right. It's hard to imagine that 20 years
from now Pacific Lumber will be logging at the rate they are
today. Sustainability is not something Hurwitz seems to have
thought about much; maximizing profit, often to the detriment
of employees, has always been more his thing.
That's why we believe it's so
important that Gallegos' lawsuit be given its day in court. In
view of PL's long history of violations, particularly in the
1990s, it's not terribly difficult to believe Gallegos' claim
that the company used deception to persuade state and federal
regulators to gain access to as many as 100,000 redwoods that
would otherwise have been off-limits because of their location
on unstable slopes.
Pacific Lumber spokeswoman Erin
Dunn repeated her claim last week that the lawsuit was "bogus
and baseless." She also insisted that the company's largesse
toward the anti-Gallegos camp had nothing to do with the lawsuit.
"We have contributed to make sure that the citizens have
a chance to vote," Dunn said last week.
I get it. Hurwitz cares about
democracy. It would have been laughable were it not so brazen.
But then in this day and age I guess that makes it hip.
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