Part one: You bought this beach
What do you think?
Post your thoughts in the guestbook.

President Bush wanted to slash federal spending for beach renourishment and force state and local governments to pay a larger share of the cost.

It's "slice and dice time," wrote sand lobbyist Howard Marlowe in an e-mail he fired off to the 15 coastal towns he represents. "Only a few beach projects are included, and almost every one of them is grossly underfunded."

On Capitol Hill, congressmen from coastal areas quickly plotted strategy.

Rep. C.W. Bill Young, the Largo Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, huddled with Rep. Sonny Callahan, a subcommittee chairman from Alabama who would be dubbed "Beach Boy" because of his fondness for federal sand.

Young and Callahan were loyal Republicans, fiscal conservatives -- and dead-set against the president's cuts in federal sand subsidies.

The six-month fight that followed is a revealing tale about the politics of sand. It illustrates the clout of a chairman, how phone calls from the right people can be more valuable than campaign contributions and how sand makes strange bedfellows.

The struggle provides an object lesson in budgetary politics of all kinds -- the never-ending conflict between belt-tightening and bringing home the bacon. It shows why all the talk of reducing federal spending rarely translates into actual cuts.

It happened last year. It will happen next year and the year after that.

It's happening right now.

'The kiss of death'

The news leaked several days before the budget books arrived on Capitol Hill: Bush wanted to shift the financial burden for beach renourishment to state and local governments.

Under the president's plan, the federal share would shrink from 65 percent to 35 percent. He had earmarked about $89-million for sand, roughly $40-million less than the year before.

For Marlowe, who represents beach towns in Florida, New Jersey, and elsewhere, the news had a familiar ring. President Bill Clinton had tried several times to scale back the sand program, only to have Congress restore it. Now it was Bush's turn.

In the upside-down world of Washington lobbying, the annual threat to funding provides job security for people like Marlowe, the capital's premier sand lobbyist. Every year, the administration proposes big cuts, and every year the lobbyists call their clients to arms.

Marlowe, 59, is a New York Democrat who admits to a terrible record in party politics. His candidate lost every time. "I was the kiss of death," he says.

He did better when he became a congressional aide, helping draft consumer-friendly federal laws on used-car warranties and Medicare coverage for kidney dialysis. He then worked as an economist and lobbyist for labor unions before starting his own firm in 1984.

A quiet man with a self-deprecating sense of humor, Marlowe works for beach towns that rely on sand and tourism for economic survival. They include Avalon, N.J., an upscale town that swells with Philadelphia families every summer; Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., a quiet town lined with stilt houses; and several beaches on Florida's west coast from Manatee County to the south.

Marlowe had to get the towns motivated. He believed they could stop Bush's proposal to force states and towns to pay a greater share. But would his clients escape individual cuts?

"I figured we were going to suffer," he recalls.

Marlowe prodded them to start lobbying early. Before the budget was delivered, they called and wrote to Bush and key members of Congress asking that the sand program be protected.

He also drafted a letter to the president with 118 signatures including chamber of commerce presidents, engineers who earn their living from beach projects, and the head of a California surfing club.

With Young to look after their interests, Pinellas County officials had not hired Marlowe. But they fired off their own letter to the Florida delegation.

"Healthy beaches ... are the most effective forms of hurricane protection," wrote Calvin Harris, chairman of the Pinellas County Commission. Harris said beaches and tourism account for more than 73,000 jobs in the county.

On the other side of the issue was a small watchdog group called Taxpayers for Common Sense.

In contrast to Marlowe's upscale K Street office, TCS has a modest storefront in southeast Washington about seven blocks from the Capitol. Homeless people occasionally sit by the doors to take shelter from rain or snow.

The nonpartisan group had been a loud critic of the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees beach renourishment. Many corps programs were unnecessary political pork, TCS argued. The group liked the Bush proposal because it would force local governments to pick up more of the tab for sand.

Unlike Marlowe, TCS leaders had no big guns for the fight. Bush was on their side, but they soon found out that they couldn't count on him for help.

Instead, TCS turned to the news media, giving reporters a copy of Marlowe's e-mail that had been conveniently leaked from Capitol Hill. Steve Ellis, the group's senior director of water resources, gave interviews on the issue and used his time-tested "Uncle Sid" line: "Why should my Uncle Sid in Omaha pay the cost? It should be paid by those who would be the beneficiaries."

The fight was on.

As Young and Callahan plotted how to defeat Bush's proposal, they added their own projects to the bill. Part of the $2-million Young earmarked for Pinellas would be used for planning renourishments on Upham and other Pinellas beaches. Upham has lost so much sand that a ridge has formed at the water line.

Meet the firewall

At the Capitol, Young and Callahan met in Young's ornate corner office, which is adorned with a crystal chandelier and paintings of his predecessors. Its prime location near the House floor, with a spectacular view of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, testifies to Young's power as chairman.

Young, an affable Republican with a Conway Twitty hairstyle, is one of the most influential people in Congress, able to divert millions of dollars with the stroke of a pen. He is a key person to know if you want to preserve federal sand dollars for your district.

"It's happened every year since I've been here," said Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach, who was first elected in 1994. "It's Bill Young who puts the firewall up."

Young's sand coalition had not been built overnight. For years, the 16-term congressman had been bringing committee members to his Pinellas County district for a firsthand look at the sugary sand.

"They know the importance of our beaches," Young said.

Callahan, a self-made millionaire who likes to boast that he was "exceedingly stingy" when he headed the subcommittee on foreign aid, had recently been appointed head of the panel that oversees the sand programs. He and Young had clashed on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola, but they were allies on sand.

They met briefly with no debate. They agreed to not only derail the administration's plan, but to add a raft of new projects to the bill. Young wanted $2-million to plan Pinellas shoreline projects and to remove stones that had been pumped onto Indian Rocks and adjacent beaches several years earlier. Callahan wanted money for his state.

Now they just had to get the rest of the Congress to go along.

A tough crowd

In May, two pro-sand lobbying groups -- the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association and the American Coastal Coalition -- held what amounted to a pep rally at the Washington Court Hotel.

Turnout was strong, and warm applause greeted pro-sand speeches, pleas for people to contact their lawmakers, and an appearance from Marlowe.

Members of Congress "are more responsive to some people than others," he said. "But they aren't responsive unless you speak up."

Then the pep rally had a visit from the rival team -- the budget cutters of the Bush administration, in the person of Rick Mertens of the Office of Management and Budget.

No applause this time. As Mertens walked onto the stage to explain why he wanted to cut the beach programs, he was greeted with stony silence.

He said the administration was wary of new beach projects because they usually turn into long-term commitments. Beaches need to be fed again and again, forcing the government to continue buying sand for at least 50 years.

"Each project added to the corps inventory is essentially there forever," Mertens said.

The crowd peppered him with tough questions. Someone even tried the not-so-subtle tactic of mentioning the Electoral College map, which showed that Bush had won many coastal states.

Mertens wasn't intimidated. He said that Congress did not prioritize the projects and that the federal sand mostly benefited local interests.

"For the federal government to be making these investments, the longstanding policy is that there ought to be a national return."

But when someone asked how the costs should be shared, he said the administration was willing to negotiate.

And finally, the crowd applauded.

Mobilizing the grass tops

In the jargon of Washington lobbyists, politics is described like a front lawn. The political base for an issue is known as the grass roots. The people with titles are the grass tops.

Marlowe's influence comes from the grass tops -- officials from beach towns with a direct line to their lawmakers.

"He has people who can call any member of Congress and get a call back within 24 hours," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "That's golden."

It appears that campaign contributions did not play much of a role. Leaders of the dredging industry, which does the sand work for the government, donated only $28,000 to congressional candidates in the first half of 2001. Young got none; Callahan received $5,000.

Marlowe himself is a bit player in the high-dollar world of campaign contributions, having given less than $8,000 since 1998. He gets asked -- a recent hello to a House member prompted a fundraising fax a few hours later -- but says he gets access without having to write checks.

By early last summer, the grass tops' efforts were paying off. Their calls and letters had spotlighted the issue and persuaded key lawmakers to throw their support to Young and Callahan.

The administration hadn't been swayed. As the letters poured into the White House and OMB, officials noticed many came from people who lived inland and owned vacation houses on the beach. That bolstered their belief that the beneficiaries of federal sand were the very wealthy.

But Bush himself said nothing about his proposal and hardly anyone else in the administration spoke up. Officials say that was a matter of timing and priorities. Sand was low on the list of budget issues.

That left the fight to the Taxpayers for Common Sense and a few environmental groups. But they were drowned out by Marlowe's civic leaders and a growing coalition of influential lawmakers.

Says Jeff Stein, water resources project coordinator for Taxpayers for Common Sense, "That's one thing the beach lobby has -- friends in high places."

How a bill becomes large

There are no party lines in the sand.

Key supporters of beach renourishment range from a liberal Democrat from New Jersey (Frank Pallone) to conservative Republicans from Florida (Young and Clay Shaw of Fort Lauderdale). Most represent beach towns, but some, such as Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican, have inland districts.

One by one, they asked Callahan to add new projects to the bill.

Young, in particular, made sure his beaches got fed. There had been no money in the Bush budget for Pinellas beaches, so he told Callahan to add the $2-million for planning and stone removal, plus half a million to study the sand needs of Egmont Key.

Callahan tossed in $1.3-million for a project in his district and Pallone and Frelinghuysen made sure the Jersey beaches were showered with sand. The Bush budget had included $9-million for New Jersey; they bumped it up to $14-million.

By the time Young's committee took up the beach budget in June, it was a political work of art, stuffed with 33 new sand projects not in the Bush proposal that added more than $20-million to the cost. They fattened 38 other projects by about $50-million. The bill also protected the original cost-sharing, so the federal government would continue to pay two-thirds of the cost.

The price tag was now $157-million -- nearly double what Bush wanted.

It passed the House Appropriations Committee with a unanimous vote. But there was one more fight before the sand lovers could claim victory.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican who headed a Libertarian think tank, is one of the most conservative members of the House. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat who rides his bicycle to the Capitol every day, is one of the most liberal.

But they have the same feelings about sand. They both believe that the federal government spends far too much money on it.

On June 27, they took their crusade to the floor of the House of Representatives. It was the first time in years the full chamber had debated sand.

Tancredo and Blumenauer offered an amendment backing the Bush proposal to put the financial burden on the state and local governments.

"Federally subsidized beach projects mainly benefit wealthy vacation condo owners and tourism," said Tancredo.

Blumenauer, a lanky man with a fondness for bow ties, quoted Duke professor Orrin Pilkey as saying federal beach projects "cost twice what the cost estimate is and end up being about half as effective."

The sandmen fought back.

Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., a North Carolina Republican famous in sand circles for a late-night maneuver that won approval for a massive renourishment of the Outer Banks, said Pilkey was "an extremist. I do not have the time to get into why I feel he is an extremist, but he is."

Callahan declared, in a rhetorical nod to the Florida delegation, that "I want to go down in history, if I leave any mark on this Congress, as the man who saved Florida beaches."

Young argued that the sand protects roads and buildings from storm damage and reduces federal costs for disaster relief.

"The better beach that exists, the less damage to the infrastructure," he said.

The vote wasn't even close.

The Tancredo-Blumenauer amendment failed 84-333. The lopsided tally was a powerful endorsement of the federal sand program. TCS carried the Texas delegation but lost nearly every other state.

The bill with $157-million in beach projects passed the House, and a slightly smaller bill was approved by the Senate.

In early November, when the two chambers reconciled their differences, the bill ended up with $142-million for beach renourishment -- the largest amount in U.S. history.

A flurry of press releases from House members crowed about the news:

Cunningham Brings Sand to Our Beaches ... Brown's Top Projects Funded ... Jones Hails Passage ...

Jones, the North Carolina Republican, boasted that he was "instrumental in defeating a proposal that would have had a devastating economic impact on coastal communities."

"Beaches," he said, "are this country's economic engines."

Epilogue

Three months ago, Bush released his new budget and once again took aim at the sand program. An early analysis showed he wanted to cut the program by 30 percent and fund no new projects in Florida.

Mitch Daniels, Bush's budget director, said the administration still believed state and local governments should pay a larger share.

"We do think the sharing has been unfair to federal taxpayers that don't benefit," Daniels said.

Marlowe fired off an e-mail to his clients.

"The president has recommended a staggering 30 percent cut in beach restoration project funding," he wrote.

The fight is on again.

-- Staff writer Bill Adair can be reached at (202) 463-0575 or adair@sptimes.com

* * *

To comment on this series, go to www.sptimes.com/sandforum/

You bought this beach

Back to World & National news

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

Special Links

Susan Taylor Martin

From the Times wire desk

Castro promises Carter open access

Sandmen

Drug smugglers tunnel into U.S. more since Sept. 11

From the AP
national wire
From the AP
world desk

Sandmen