How green was McGavick?

WASHINGTON — Democrats accuse Senate candidate Mike McGavick of being a friend of big oil and an enemy of the environment.

But McGavick says his role in the fierce 1994 congressional battle over the Superfund toxic-cleanup program shows his interest in protecting the environment and holding polluters accountable.

At the time, McGavick was the point man on the Superfund issue for the insurance industry's lobby, the American Insurance Association (AIA).

He ran the AIA's Superfund Improvement Project, which he says supported the program established by Congress to clean up the country's most polluted industrial sites.

McGavick also proposed changes to the law aimed at saving the insurance industry millions, if not billions, in litigation costs, through a special trust fund.

"It was different from ideas from others in the insurance industry and among many Republicans who wanted to get people off the hook, " he said.

Washington state, with several toxic sites, had a huge stake in the Superfund reform bill that was being pushed by then-Rep. Al Swift, D-Everett.

In mid-1994, the legislation seemed headed for passage. But it was derailed that fall after a revolt by some insurers and corporations that were encouraged by Republican leaders to wait out the midterm elections.

That November, the Republican revolution swept Democrats out of leadership in the House and Senate.

Swift's Superfund bill died, along with the taxes on polluter companies to finance cleanup.

McGavick, who served as then-Sen. Slade Gorton's chief of staff before joining AIA, said he left D.C. disillusioned by defeat and what he called the "cynical" behavior of Republican chiefs.

"I chose to leave after the 1994 election because I thought the GOP would push for the wrong thing — and they did," he said.

McGavick's role criticized

Not everyone agrees that McGavick had the environment foremost in mind during the Superfund negotiations.

"Mike McGavick worked alongside the strongest opponents of the 'polluter-paid' program," which industry wanted to gut, said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who was involved in the 1994 debate.

She dismissed McGavick's description of his role as someone trying to save the cleanup program. "You can dress up a pig in a new outfit from Nordstrom's, but it's still a pig," Boxer said.

The polluter-paid provision, also called retroactive liability, required that companies pay to clean up pollution they helped cause before 1980, the year the Superfund was created.

McGavick testified several times against the provision.

"Nothing can be more maddening, nor is more unfair, than to make people pay enormous sums today for the legal and often government-directed handling of waste years ago," he told the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 1994.

Despite the inclusion of retroactive liability, McGavick and the AIA supported Swift's bill. They also pushed for a special trust fund called the Environmental Insurance Resolution Fund, to which insurers and polluters would contribute.

The trust fund would be tapped to help pay for cleanup and avoid expensive and time-consuming lawsuits over liability.

After the 1980 Superfund bill first passed, major corporations facing cleanup costs wanted smaller companies and localities that also had a role in contaminating various sites to help foot the bills.

The companies and localities then turned to their insurance firms to cover the costs, leading to massive litigation. "The money wasn't going to cleanup, it was going to lawyers," McGavick said.

But Rena Steinzor, who was an attorney on the National Superfund Commission in 1994, said the proposed trust fund would not have provided enough money to clean up the sites.

She also said debate over the trust fund served only to stall the legislation.

"It was a political game," said Steinzor, now a law professor in D.C.

Bill eventually dies

McGavick's trust-fund idea wasn't universally popular in the insurance industry.

One of the nation's most powerful insurance executives, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg of AIG, despised the proposal because he didn't want to help pay for someone else's liability.

"He called out of the blue, and I didn't know who he was; he started telling me how wrong I was," McGavick recalled. "A half-hour later I found out he had been calling AIA board members to get me fired."

Former Democratic Congressman Dennis Eckhart of Ohio, a lobbyist for the AIA, described McGavick as neither a "tree-hugger" nor "an industry naysayer." Eckhart co-wrote one of the earlier Superfund bills while in Congress.

Eckhart said McGavick was trying to persuade insurance companies to help pay for cleanup, saying "we know we have to fund some of it."

Shortly after Labor Day in 1994, at a Superfund meeting in the Old Executive Office Building, Greenberg announced his implacable opposition to the bill.

"Hank was off the reservation," McGavick said.

Greenberg and others had been told by Republican leaders to wait until after the election for a new Congress, McGavick said.

Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., decided they would block any major legislation before the midterm election, where they sensed impending victory, McGavick added.

A couple of weeks later, McGavick awoke to an editorial in The Washington Post entitled "Perhaps the Worst Congress," bewailing the demise of Superfund reform.

"I have that framed, to remind me about hubris," he said.

After the election, McGavick suggested that the Superfund program might be dumped entirely.

He also told reporters at the time, "Eliminating retroactive liability, for instance, will be a real possibility with the new GOP Congress."

Did McGavick secretly hope the Superfund bill would stall? "I believed in the public interest and fought for it," McGavick said.

In a recent interview, Swift said McGavick played straight. But he added, "When the bill died, I'm not sure anyone in the insurance industry held a large funeral."

Alicia Mundy: 202-662-7457 or amundy@seattletimes.com