Advocate Summary

Issue:  Smart Growth and Transportation Reauthorization
Advocate:  Sierra Club – Melody Flowers
Date of Interview: 6/11/02

Basic Background
I run our SMART growth campaign here, and our number one focus for this year and I’m sure throughout next year is going to be transportation issues, specifically taking advantage of the opportunity that Congress is reauthorizing the federal transportation bill. They are set to reauthorize it in the fall of next year we are working to try to get a good reauthorization, from our perspective a good reauthorization will be on that spends more money on clean transportation alternatives and less focus on auto-only developments, um, highways, new sprawl inducing highways, out through farmland and wetlands and running over communities and things like that. 

Prior Activity on the Issue 
Every year our national campaign releases a national report usually in the fall, last year because things got kind of crazy last year, we wound up not releasing one until November, it was Clearing the Air of Transit Spending, and this report looked at the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country and compared their ozone pollution level with their transportation funding priorities, so basically how much they spend on highways versus how much they spend on everything else, and gave them a grade for their ozone pollution and their spending and compared that drawing a correlation between investing in transportation alternatives and cleaner air. So that was last November. We produce a number of educational materials, factsheets, we have a fact sheet on reauthorization called, Better Communities Start with more Transportation Choices. We have  a ah, I’m here in our legislative office and so handle a lot of our national policy development, and the little lobbying that we do, we are mainly a C3 public education foundation, so we focus on the non lobbying aspects, material production research and that kind of stuff. Then there are also, we have field staff across the country and quite a few of them are focused on sprawl and transportation issues, so when we develop reports and the fact sheets they get disseminated out to all of those organizers, they do local releases, they localize the data, they tie it to a specific story there, they help to educate people in the communities and towns about transportation issues. So they work on both the positive and negative sides; they work to stop bad highways as well as to running local campaigns to generate revenue sources for a new transit line or a new bus service. 

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
We do a lot of coalition work, there are a number of large environmental and transportation reform organizations here in the DC area that we work very closely with and mainly that is on the national policy development side of things, what are the policies we are going to support. The Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, Surface Transportation Policy Project, Defenders of Wildlife, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Scenic America, Friends of the Earth, Smart Growth America, those are the big ones that come to mind, the Coalition to Defend NEPA, the Transportation Campaign, it goes on and on, there are a lot of people interested in transportation, mainly because it’s a heck of a lot of money, the reauthorization bill will be in excess of 300 billion dollars to spend over six years. Um, what else do we do…we also serve in war general kind of information and dissemination, we keep a list serve, and email lists and send out action alerts to our core members, and non-members that sign up to be on our list serve.  We try to support local campaigns through mini-grants or actual financial support or technical assistance so we help them plan campaigns, run campaigns, figure out how to target key decision makers things like that. Those are the basics really. And a lot of media work, we at the Sierra Club have a big emphasis on media it’s the best whole sale way to reach a lot of people and do public education work, you know get it on the nightly news, or in the local paper and people find out about it. 

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
[They along with their coalition partners, plan to draw up a blue print for what they want out of reauthorization – see miscellaneous]

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
On the House and Senate side, the two biggest committees overseeing (?) C3 are the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and in the House the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee we have more friends on the Senate side than on the House side, that’s generally how things are going these days for the environmental community. Senator Jeffords is the Chair of the EPW committee and he’s definitely a friend of the environment, they’ve done some very interesting things there in Vermont, so they actually serve as a model sometimes for what we could be doing nationally with our policy. Senator Reid from Nevada is often times a good friend. 

Targets of Direct Lobbying
Then there are other people who we think could be friends, on the other side of the aisle. Senator Spector from Pennsylvania is very important to us, as well as, Senator Chafee from Road Island. So we try to hit both sides of the aisle, both the Rs and the Ds it’s not always as easy to get the Rs so we do focus a lot of attention on those swing Republican votes. They are very important. 

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
The Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, Surface Transportation Policy Project, Defenders of Wildlife, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Scenic America, Friends of the Earth, Smart Growth America, those are the big ones that come to mind, the Coalition to Defend NEPA, the Transportation Campaign, it goes on and on.
The most formal one, the one we try to coordinate most of our activities under is the Surface Transportation Policy Project, they are strictly transportation reform, so not only do they include environmental groups in that coalition, but also the public health advocates, walking and biking advocates, transit organized labor groups, a number of groups, and we tend to coordinate a number of our activities under their umbrella. 

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
See opponents below.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
We focus on the public health aspects. As communities sprawl further, a large part of that being due to our transportation choices are funding highways over other choices, there are millions of pounds of air pollution being spewed into the air that we breath and that is linked to asthma, lung cancer, a myriad of lung diseases, so to us it’s really about cleaning up the air.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
We work with groups that a lot of other arguments as well, Defenders of Wild Life focuses on habitat and the animals, our strongest niche, and where we come at this is from the public health, air quality stand um but we also look at the smart growth implications. Offering transportation choices versus sprawl inducing highways you can coordinate that with better land use decisions and produce smarter communities and so that’s also  something we talk about, is how transportation choices produce smart growth, but again we care about smart growth because we care about clean air and clean water. So it often comes back to clean air and clean water, and quite frankly you know health children resonates with the public a lot better than hey, build me a new urbanist community, so you go with what works. 

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
None mentioned.

Nature of the Opposition
There is an enormous, well funded highway lobby out there. The Highway Users, ARTFA, ASHTO, certain developers the asphalt interests, the asphalt industry. They make a lot of money off building highways, and they’ve been making a lot of money for the past fifty years, since we first passed, I think it was called a National Defense Highway System. So there are some very entrenched interests out there that we are lobbying against.  

[Impediments]
I think one of the biggest things to know, and I think this will probably relate to a lot of other issues you’ll be talking to people about, the overriding context for the reauthorization of the transportation bill and anything else with a price tag associated with it is that there is not a lot of money. We aren’t in a big surplus time like we were last time in 97 when this bill was reauthorized and so the wallets are tighter, there’s a lot of competition, it seems like every spare dollar we have these days is going to fund the war on terrorism and so last reauthorization it was just a much bigger pie and everybody got a bigger slice, whereas this time we’re going to be fighting over a smaller pie and there not going to be as willing to shove some money transit’s way so it just kind of alters the entire context of reauthorization. Therefore we are looking at things like innovative financing, how can we develop some innovative financing schemes that still allow for transparency and accountability in the system, so you’re not just giving more money to build more bad projects and it also means that we are looking at, there’s not a lot of hope for creating big new projects. There is currently in the bill a program called CMAQ, Congestion, Mitigation and Air Quality, and it looks at air quality issues, well a lot of people said we need something like that for water, and it would be a totally new program, the likelihood of that coming through is slim to none because there’s just no money for it, that it’s probably smarter for us to just tinker with the CMAQ program and get that one right, and them maybe next time when there’s more money, try to then replicate it into a water program. So it kind of alters your strategy a little bit knowing that there’s not a lot of money there. So that’s the biggest thing this time around. [Will you be putting a model together of innovative financing?] We’re actually in the process through STPP, through all of these groups working together in a coalition, coming up with a blueprint of what we want out of reauthorization, probably down the road in the fall, in October have that ready for release for a big public release. We’ll probably do something at the National Press club, and then we’ll probably send it out across the field to do local releases, for people to talk about – this is how this will effect us here locally. 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
Their main argument is actually fairly circular, they say that, look people are driving a lot therefore people want to be driving a lot, therefore we should build them more roads, without paying attention to the fact that – the reason people are driving a lot is because we’ve only invested in highways and haven’t given them the choices they need to do something other that drive. We’re not going to just stay home because we don’t have a light rail line to ride on, you’re going to get in your car and go somewhere. If you don’t have any choice then you have to get in your car, and they use that as the justification for building ever more highways. They also point to, you know you can slice numbers any way you want to and try to argue that lane capacity, which is you know the number of roads in the country, that lane capacity hasn’t kept up with population growth, but the fact is because we are subsidizing highways over other forms of transit the amount that people have to drive, not the amount people choice to drive, is way outpacing the population growth, and if we were to give people more choices, we could better balance out the type of travel we are opting for. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
The Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Mr. Young from Alaska, not a big friend of the environment you would say. We’re going to have a tough time there. There is one particular issue coming up in preview to reauthorization – the issue of environmental streamlining. Anytime you are going to have a big transportation project be build you have to go through an environmental review process first, to figure out what are the impacts on the environment going to be, how can we minimize those impacts and the impacts that we can’t avoid, how do we mitigate their effects. We have to do that because of a national law called NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act, that mandates anytime the federal government is involved in funding a major project that you have to do this environmental review. A lot of our opposition like to wine and cry and scream that this review is so burdensome that it slows down their projects, that it takes years to build a highway. And a lot of that is rhetorical and anecdotal taking the one really bad example and saying it’s the norm when that actually isn’t the case.  The numbers from the Federal Highway Administration themselves show that it only accounts for 2 to 3 years of what is usually a 10 year process. The big slow downs are lack of funding for the local match, community opposition so people that don’t want a highway in their back yard, to lack of resources in agencies like Fish and Wildlife that have to do the reviews and issue the permit they simply don’t have enough staff, over the past six years the Fish and Wild Life Service has had like a 70% increase in the number of project reviews they are supposed to complete and only a one percent increase in resources to do that. So there are a lot of other reasons but however the environment has become the scapegoat on this and there is pressure to do some kind of federal regulation streamlining this environmental review process. And so we’ve gotten into a few fights already with the majority staff on the T&I committee, Mr. Young’s staff and it’s quite obvious we’re not buddies. 

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
None mentioned.

Described as a Partisan Issue
Not particularly, they try to get MCs from both sides of the aisle but she noted that the “Rs are harder to get”

Venue(s) of Activity
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee 
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
Transportation reauthorization scheduled for the fall of next year. 

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
Working to include more funding for transportation alternatives in the transportation reauthorization than funding for more highways.

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
My first job out of college, I worked for the Department of Transportation, I had a political science background, but didn’t have much of a transportation background, but became very interested in it working there, and I was always interested in the environment, I went to school in Kentucky and did a lot of work on opposing surface mining techniques and mountain-top removal which is where they are lopping off the tops of mountains and burying streams, it’s a pretty hideous practice, it’s destroying the landscape down there. So I started looking for opportunities, I did a one year training academy in grassroots organizing and through them met the national field director here at the Sierra Club and got a job offer. And I’ve been here a little over year.  

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We don’t contract with any universities or think tanks, like for this report Cleaning the Air, this is our own research from the Federal Transit Administration and the Federal Highway Administration and just putting it together in different ways. So I guess I would call it secondary level research, we take other people’s data and put it together in a way that makes our argument, it put it together in new ways that we think will show the public health effects of certain things. And then we also, Sierra Club is a little different than other organizations in that we are the largest grassroots environmental organization in the country we have about 750,000 members and the real strength of our organization is the ability to mobilize people across the country, so we often help in the release of other organization’s reports because they don’t have that field staff, they don’t have the regional offices, and the chapter office in every state and volunteers that can put on a press conference in just about any city you would want. So we do a lot of co-releases, because that’s really one of our niches is being able to get media attention being able to have that national coverage and be able to get the word out.

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
[Some members of each team – see below]

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
There are about 50 to 60 people here, not everyone here lobbies though.  We’re divided up into what they call “teams” I am on the Environmental Quality Team we handle air and water pollution, sprawl fits into that because of the air and water impact, pollution from factor farms and paper sites, we work on maintaining and supporting the Clean Air Act. Then you have the Global Warmer Energy Team, you have the Public Lands Team, they deal with national forest issues and the like, then you have the International Team the deal with population, trade and human rights and the environment issues, those are what I consider the issue teams, and then you also have functional teams, like the Media Team, and my campaign has a liaison on the Media Team, and then there is the Political Team, they work on campaigns, we endorse candidates in elections, and we have a PAC, and so the Political Team coordinates a lot of that kind of work. I think that’s everybody in this office. And then some administrative staff. Then on a given team say on the Environmental Quality Team are seven of us, and I would say three of us lobby on a regular basis, other people do agency or regulatory work or they do research or field support, material production, working on the website, keeping it updated, sending out action alerts, that kind of stuff. So we don’t lobby full time in this office as much as some other organizations do. 

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Individuals

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
470,000

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous