Chapter 7
ATERFORD INTERNATIONALS BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETING was scheduled for 9 a.m. at their Asheville, North Carolina corporate headquarters, but the crucial decisions regarding the company’s fate were being decided by McGuire family members the evening before. Philip McGuire, the chairman and C.E.O, his brother the senator, and their sister Margaret met at Philip’s estate to discuss their strategy.
The company had maintained, for nearly a century now, that the molasses-colored effluents discharged from its pulp and paper mill into the Pigeon River were of no biological harm to the river’s aquatic life, and that its record for environmental responsibility stood on its own. In fact, Waterford’s lawyers successfully maneuvered around individual and class action law suits, Tennessee State suits and legislation, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Even though litigation and federal standards for a clean environment had intensified; the sulfite and sulfate chemical methods for manufacturing pulp and paper, that the industry had used since 1885, required unrestricted pollution of the air and water. And, because they were located in very small communities and provided good paying jobs to economically depressed regions of the country, they had successfully lobbied state and federal government for waivers.
In the early 1900’s the Smoky Mountains had supplied the nation with lumber from about 15 lumber mills that would quickly denude most of the large hardwoods from the unprotected primeval forests of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Waterford had been involved in that short-lived, yet extremely profitable industry too but, involved in paper manufacturing more so than in lumber milling, they had somewhat selectively timbered the evergreen spruce for paper.
In the 1930’s a paper process was developed that could utilize the quick growing southern pine as raw material and Waterford, using the proceeds from its land sale to park organizers, bought millions of acres of family farms and public property that were then converted to pine tree farms. Purchased at bargain prices during the Great Depression, politicians applauded Waterford’s actions, disingenuously pointing to the economic shot in the arm that it provided Appalachian workers living in the most economically depressed area of the South.
Nevertheless, the effluents from the Waterford plant continued to flow through two states, Tennessee and North Carolina and, while both states had many paper mills on their tax rolls and weak environmental protection legislation, citizen pressure from downriver towns and cities bordering the Pigeon River in Tennessee was coming to a head.Senator Jack McGuire knew that environmental protection had been popular political agenda for the Democrats in the eighties and nineties. Liberal television and even some newspaper editors had played to the public’s emotions, convincing them that endangered animals and clean water was more important than jobs, and that lumber and paper mills, oil companies, and hydo-electric and nuclear power utilities were destroying the environment. He thought it ironic that the same liberals championing the endangered spotted owl, snail darters and brook trout, for crissakes, lived in their comfy estates with oak flooring and cherry furniture, their wives wore animal furs, their three-car garages held overpriced and foreign, gas guzzling SUV's, and their children's cell phones contributed to thousands of "comm towers" trashing the landscape.
"Why, hell, more people have eaten a McDonald's fish sandwich than have ever caught a fish, and plastic grocery bags aren’t any more environmentally safe than the good-ol’ paper ones."
He also knew that Al Gore, running for President in 2000, would be hard pressed not to support tougher environmental protection laws in his home state of Tennessee; and that, if Tennessee held their paper mills to higher environmental standards, they certainly weren’t going to let a North Carolina company continue to pollute the rivers inside their boundaries.
The chairman insisted that they fight this latest liberal crusade, but his brother and sister cautioned him against it. "Look, Philip, we’ll play right into the Democrats' hands if we contest an EPA ruling. They’ll play our actions up in the media as just another multi-national conglomerate trying to rape the countryside and, I’ll tell you this," Jack added, "our Republican friends will wash their hands faster than Pilate on this one. They’re going to be looking at campaign finance reform as a crucial political issue and, while we’ll attack the DNC for influence peddling, we can’t be too careful about our own fund raising activities, including the soft money contributions we've made to the G.O.P. Now, what we’ve got to do is take a diversionary action that emphasizes the economic well being of the region, and show these liberals that we mean business."
"Just what are you suggesting, Jack?" asked Philip.
"Sell the North Carolina plant."
"Are you crazy," Margaret chimed in, "who would buy it?"
"The employees, of course," beamed the Senator. "Offer it to our employees and that takes all the heat off of us."
"Of course we'll keep control," Margaret grinned.
"Hell, they won't even come up with the downpayment."
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