By their third meeting in early 1990, Tere Harris' King County group, Property Owners for Property Rights, reorganized as the Property Rights Alliance. The Property Rights Alliance would be the prototypical Wise Use group in Puget Sound. A few of the board would later form the spin-off Cedar County Committee, the first well-organized secession drive. Both Harris and Ted Cowan had lobbying experience. Harris would be an important connection between the Master Builders and property-rights groups. Cowan would serve as a leader of both the Property Rights Alliance and the associated Cedar County committee. Brian Derdowski, newly elected to the King County Council, was quick to warn that the Alliance was masquerading as a friend to small property owners, while actually being led by developers and realtors. The Alliance's board included a lobbyist for developers, a real-estate asset manager, a contractor/developer and a retired realtor at the time it was formed.18,19,20
Wise Use was still nearly a year away from public exposure. It would be almost a year later that the first article critical of Wise Use would run in a national magazine and even longer before the Seattle media examined the connections. In Puget Sound, the property rights groups would have a clear run in the absence of press and public scrutiny during their initial organizing drive.
The next property-rights group to appear was the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance, known as SNOCO PRA. In the summer of 1990, Jeannette Burrage of the Northwest Legal Foundation represented them in an assault on a Snohomish critical areas ordinance. The standard Wise Use strategy for preserving developers' subsidies and tax advantages: protest, lawsuit, referendum, lawsuit, election, lawsuit. SNOCO PRA hired Terre Harris as a political consultant to run a referendum campaign to take most of the starch out of the ordinance. By October 1990, Harris announced that SNOCO PRA had enough signatures to put the referendum on the ballot. A complex series of legal maneuvers began that would ultimately lead to Snohomish County suing the PRA members over the referendum campaign, a lawsuit which would not be settled by the Supreme Court until January 27, 1994.24,28
SNOCO PRA's executive director, Jim Klauser, had two interesting connections. First of all, he was on the board of the Northwest Legal Foundation. Secondly, like Harris, he had been an official with the Master Builders Association, their president.
A March 4, 1993 letter from Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties (associated with National Assn. of Home Builders) stated that "While we have worked within the governmental process, we have also supported the formation and development of a strong property rights movement in Snohomish County. We've provided major funding to these efforts, which are more sophisticated than any other county in Washington. ...The county wide policies themselves, later this spring, may be the subject of a referendum campaign. This depends on the outcome of litigation between county elected officials and citizens who have filed a referendum to repeal the policies." The letter is signed by Mike Echelbarger, MBA President and Rick Lennon, MBA First Vice President. Klauser's later activities with the Washington Property Rights Network would underscore the important role of the development industry in creating the property rights organizations in Puget Sound.101
For the 1991 legislative session, Ted Cowan, a member of Gottlieb's Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and long-time Wise Use supporter, filed with the Public Disclosure Commission as a lobbyist for the King County Outdoor Sports Council, the (King County) Property Rights Alliance and another Wise Use group, the Washington Rivers Coalition, which was fighting Wild and Scenic Rivers designations. This group had been involved with Chuck Cushman in the fight to thwart protecting part of the Columbia River gorge since 1989.
By the end of 1991, the network that Arnold had envisaged in Ecology Wars began to weave its mesh over Puget Sound:
"Citizen groups are not limited by liability, contract law or ethical codes. They can say bluntly what needs to be said without hiding behind corporate timidity or fear of offending customers. They can provide something for the masses to join, to be part of, to fight for, to satisfy that 'need for a sense of belonging' that psychologist Maslow told us about. They can get on with aggressively building legal fences around environmentalists where industry and its associations can ill afford such a controversial role. They can network with other citizen activist groups such as Consumer Alert to form broad-based political coalitions..." [Ecology Wars, p. 126]
Terre Harris, now back with the Property Rights Alliance in King County, started a petition drive to challenge the King County critical areas ordinance. Jim Klauser, seeing an opportunity, called an organizational meeting to form the Washington Property Rights Network. At this December 1991 gathering in Snohomish County, Klauser brought together development industry officials and property rights activists to discuss extending the organizations that had developed to a state-wide level. A significant attendee at the meeting was Ron Arnold -- the original architect of the Wise Use Movement.31
Arnold had described the December organizational meeting of Klauser's Washington Property Rights Network in James Wallace's March 1992 P-I story about Wise Use joining forces with the development industry to fight the GMA. Arnold told the P-I, "The main reason that I went was just to make sure the issue was not going to fall between the cracks. We essentially just said, 'Anything we can do to support you, just let us know. If you need special help in fund raising, come see us.'"
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