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  • Greenie's lawyers billing US Government for millions

    Activist ‘Green’ Lawyers Billing U.S. Millions in Fraudulent Attorney Fees
    by Richard Pollock

    Without any oversight, accounting, or transparency, environmental activist groups have surreptitiously received at least $37 million from the federal government for questionable “attorney fees.” The lawsuits they received compensation for had nothing to do with environmental protection or improvement.

    The activist groups have generated huge revenue streams via the obscure Equal Access to Justice Act. Congressional sources claim the groups are billing for “cookie cutter” lawsuits — they file the same petitions to multiple agencies on procedural grounds, and under the Act, they file for attorney fees even if they do not win the case. Since 1995, the federal government has neither tracked nor accounted for any of these attorney fee payments.

    Nine national environmental activist groups alone have filed more than 3,300 suits, every single one seeking attorney fees. The groups have also charged as much as $650 per hour (a federal statutory cap usually limits attorney fees to $125 per hour).

    In well over half of the cases, there was no court judgment in the environmental groups’ favor. In all cases, whether there was any possible environmental benefit from the litigation is highly questionable. Most cases were simply based upon an alleged failure to comply with a deadline or to follow a procedure.

    A whistleblower who was employed for 30 years by the U.S. Forest Service told Pajamas Media:

    Some organizations have built a business doing this and attacking the agencies on process, and then getting “reimbursed.”

    This week a bipartisan group of congressional members introduced legislation to end the secrecy of the payments and force the government to open up the records to show exactly how much has been paid to the groups and the questionable attorney fees. The legislation was sponsored by Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming), Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD), and Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah).

    Congressional sources have said the disclosure was necessary to determine the extent of fraud and abuse. The $37 million is considered only a fraction of what has been paid out to the activist groups.

    “For too long, taxpayers have unwittingly served as the financiers of the environmental litigation industry,” Rep. Bishop, who also is the chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus, said.

    Rep. Herseth Sandlin remarked: “Simply put, this legislation is about ensuring good and open government.”

    “It’s time to shine some light [on the program],” explained Rep. Lummis, who said the groups have created an industry that “supports their ‘stop everything’ agenda.”

    The $37 million figure is considered low. It includes less than a dozen groups and only accounts for cases in 19 states and the District of Columbia. There are hundreds of eco-activist groups in the United States.

    According to the whistleblower who served in the U.S. Forest Service, environmental activist groups typically file identical lawsuits to multiple agencies on procedural grounds, such as a missed deadline.

    The identity of the huge revenue stream was established by the Western Legacy Alliance (“WLA”), along with Wyoming-based attorney Karen Budd-Falen. Western Legacy Alliance was founded in 2008 by ranchers and resource providers who raise beef and lamb on public lands of the West. What they found was astounding.

    Examining court records in 19 states and in the District of Columbia, the total amount paid to less than a dozen environmental groups exceeded $37 million. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Budd-Falen. “We believe when the curtain is raised we’ll be talking about radical environmental groups bilking the taxpayer for hundreds of millions of dollars, all allegedly for ‘reimbursement for attorney fees.’ And what is even more maddening is that these groups are claiming that they are protecting the environment with all this litigation when not one dime of this money goes to projects that impact anything on-the-ground related to the environment. It just goes to more litigation to get more attorney fees to file more litigation.”

    The whistleblower, speaking anonymously, told Pajamas Media the payments to the activists groups were “quite astronomical.” The former government agent was a line officer in a high-ranking position. That whistleblower added that the filings by the radical groups often were “canned” petitions that contained little research. In this way, environmental groups could pepper government agencies with a flood of lawsuits without much work.

    “They will send a myriad of lawsuits across the bow to try to stop a number of projects or programs and then they hopefully will score with one or two,” he said. He saw a lot of the activist lawsuit filings because he had been attached both to the Forest Service’s Washington headquarters and to its field offices. “Then they will send in bills that are quite frankly, quite astronomical compared to the actual work they had to do to file an actual lawsuit. Many of the lawsuits are filed under a lot of canned material, yet the hours and rates that they charge were quite high.”

    Here is a sampling of the number of assembly line “lawsuits” filed between 2000 and 2009 that have been painstakingly identified by the Western Legacy Alliance and Budd-Falen. Activist group Western Watersheds Project filed 91 lawsuits in the federal district courts; Forest Guardians (now known as WildEarth Guardians) filed 180 lawsuits; the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) filed at 409 suits; the Wilderness Society filed 149 lawsuits; the National Wildlife Federation filed 427 lawsuits; and the Sierra Club filed 983 lawsuits. These numbers do not include administrative appeals or notices of intent to sue.

    Even local or regional environmental groups have figured out ways to turn on the taxpayer spigot. WLA found the Idaho Conservation League filed 72 lawsuits and the Oregon Natural Desert Association filed 50. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance filed 88 lawsuits. At last count, just eight local groups in nine Western states have filed nearly 1,600 lawsuits against the federal government.

    On the national level, over the last decade nine national environmental groups have filed 3,300 cases against the federal government. As is usual, the vast majority of the cases deal with the alleged procedural failings of federal agencies, not with substance or science.

    Said the Forest Service officer: “A lot of times they will sue on process, and not on substance. And substance means what difference does it mean for the resource, or what’s going in on the ground? A lot of times, it will be a process lawsuit and a lot of times the agency either missed something. … The bottom line is many, many times, when you look at the results on the ground, it [the environmental group winning the litigation] would have made very little difference.”

    Karen Budd-Falen said that the cases amounted to a ripoff of taxpayers and rewarded radical groups with millions of dollars. “Although those of us involved in protecting property rights and land use in the West were aware that radical groups were getting exorbitant fees simply be filing litigation against the government, we had no idea of the magnitude of the problem.”

    Budd-Falen highlighted one case that typifies the gravy train that has flowed to environmental groups. In 2009, the Earthjustice Legal Foundation represented the Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the Vermont Natural Resources Council in a case dealing with the process used by the Forest Service to adopt some regulations. The Earthjustice Legal Foundation filed for attorney fees for that single case that took only one year and three months to complete.

    The same suit was filed by the Western Environmental Law Center on behalf of other environmental groups. The seven total attorneys who worked on the case billed the federal government $479,242. They charged between $300 to $650 per hour, far above the statuary federal cap of $125. The case was resolved at the district court level and the federal government did not appeal.

    The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) also files a significant amount of litigation and receives lucrative attorney fees. In Washington State Federal District Court alone, CBD received attorney fees totaling $941,000 for only six cases. In the District of Columbia, it received more than $1 million in fees.

    Fourteen groups identified as recipients of the Act’s funding are: the Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Colorado Environmental Coalition, Forest Guardians, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Western Watersheds Project, Defenders of Wildlife, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, WildEarth, Oregon Natural Desert Association, Oregon Wild, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and Wyoming Outdoor Council.

    One of the fourteen groups, the Center for Biological Diversity, called the two Republicans and one Democrat “rabid right-wingers” and said that the charges of abuse was “patently false and patently ridiculous,” according to Bill Snape, senior council for CBD.

    Another study from Virginia Tech University discovered similar findings as a result of a comprehensive Freedom of Information Act request to five federal agencies. The Virginia Tech study also revealed that two of the agencies could provide absolutely no data on the Act’s payments.

    Environmental organizations are among the most financially prosperous non-profits in the country. The Sierra Club alone in 2007 reported its total worth as $56.6 million. According to 2007 Internal Revenue Service records, the top ten environmental presidents receive as much as a half million dollars a year in annual compensation. Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, Inc reported $492,000 in executive compensation in 2007. The top ten highest grossing environmental executives all received at least $308,000 in compensation.

    Environmental activist groups also have been among the most influential in throwing around political money. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, between 2000 and this year activist environmental political action committees have given $3.4 million in campaign contributions to candidates for federal office. About 87% of the money went to Democrats.

    Richard Pollock is the Washington, D.C., editor for Pajamas Media and the Washington bureau chief of PJTV.

    http://nmflc.blogspot.com/2010/08/ac...illing-us.html

  • #2
    Equal Access to Justice Act Hot Topic Update

    March 5, 2010

    To read previous Hot topic story click here

    Business Leaders Applaud Effort To Require Disclosure of Taxpayer Subsidies to Lawyers Who Sue Government

    Bipartisan Legislation Introduced in Congress Yesterday “A Small But Important Step Toward Long-Overdue Legal Reform”

    WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 4, 2010) — Wealthy activist groups that sue the government and then force taxpayers to pick up the tab for their attorneys’ fees would now have those taxpayer subsidies disclosed to the public under legislation jointly introduced by Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House this week.

    The Western Business Roundtable applauded the bipartisan measure, called the “Open Equal Access to Justice Act of 2010,” which was jointly introduced today by U.S. Reps. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD) and Rob Bishop (R-UT).

    “The bill would further President Obama’s commitment to greater ‘transparency’ in government by giving taxpayers more information on how their tax dollars are being spent,” said Jim Sims, President and CEO of the Western Business Roundtable. “There are few government programs that can’t be improved by shining the disinfecting light of public disclosure on how taxpayer funds are spent, and the Equal Access to Justice Act is clearly one of them.”

    The original intent of the Equal Access To Justice Act (EAJA), enacted in 1980, was to help individuals and organizations with limited means seek judicial redress from the federal government by allowing them to recover the legal fees and expenses when they sue the government and win. However, in recent years, a small handful of wealthy activist organizations have “milked” the program for many millions of dollars, according to government spending watchdog groups.

    While there is no official government accounting of how many taxpayer dollars go to fund these lawsuits, a recent study led by Karen Budd-Falen, a Wyoming attorney, found that, over the past 15 years, more than a dozen environmental groups have brought over 1,500 federal cases in 17 states and the District of Columbia and collected more than $37 million in taxpayer dollars through EAJA or other similar laws.

    “The Equal Access to Justice Act is a good example of a well-intentioned program that has been badly abused,” Sims said. “In many ways, it has helped to fuel the modern ‘environmental litigation industry.’ A very good case can be made that these tax dollars are funding some of the most effective job-killing efforts in America today.”

    “At a minimum, this use of tax dollars should be subjected to the disinfecting light of public disclosure, which is what this bill does,” he added.

    The proposed legislation would not bar continued reimbursements to individual and groups under the EAJA, but would instead:

    * Reinstate and consolidate tracking and reporting requirements of EAJA payments under the Department of Justice (DoJ).

    * Require the DoJ to issue an annual, online report to Congress regarding the amount of fees and other expenses awarded during the preceding fiscal year.

    * Ensure that the report provided to Congress be made available to the public online and include:

    o the name of the party seeking the award of fees;

    o the agency to which the application for the award is made;

    o the name of the administrative judges involved in the case; and

    o the hourly fees of all attorneys and expert witnesses.

    * Request that the Comptroller General commence an audit of past actions taken under the Equal Access to Justice Act. Once complete, the audit must be reported to Congress.

    “We are pleased to see Congress taking steps towards ending the abuse of this law,” Sims said. “Representatives Cynthia Lummis, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, Rob Bishop and the others pushing this legislation are heroes of the taxpayers for their work on this issue.”
    # # #

    Contact:

    Michelle Hindmarch
    Western Business Roundtable
    303-577-4611
    michelle@wbrt.org

    http://balanceduse.org/news/equal-ac...-topic-update/

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by fourbangeryj View Post
      The proposed legislation would not bar continued reimbursements to individual and groups under the EAJA, but would instead:

      * Reinstate and consolidate tracking and reporting requirements of EAJA payments under the Department of Justice (DoJ).

      * Require the DoJ to issue an annual, online report to Congress regarding the amount of fees and other expenses awarded during the preceding fiscal year.

      * Ensure that the report provided to Congress be made available to the public online and include:

      o the name of the party seeking the award of fees;

      o the agency to which the application for the award is made;

      o the name of the administrative judges involved in the case; and

      o the hourly fees of all attorneys and expert witnesses.

      * Request that the Comptroller General commence an audit of past actions taken under the Equal Access to Justice Act. Once complete, the audit must be reported to Congress.
      OK that's all fine and dandy but all I see going on here is our tax dollars being diverted from the Greenies to more government oversight and more and more layers of government. Just shut that damn program down. Make the greenies fight this war the same way we do. It's no wonder they kill us at every turn; they have Nukes and we have Pea shooters.
      [CENTER][COLOR=#ff0000]Resistance Off Road
      [/COLOR]Join the Resistance...
      http://www.resistanceoffroad.us[/CENTER]

      Comment


      • #4
        I agree!
        More law suits = more money weather they win or loose = more law suits = more money = more law suits...

        It amazes me that there is a government program that pays people to sue the government! Let alone not keeping a record of who and how much is paid!

        Comment


        • #5
          I don't see why we don't use the same tactic....
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