WRScompass Issues "Fact Check" for recent comments made by Bud Chiles

In response to recent comments made by Bud Chiles, potential democratic nominee for Florida Governor, WRScompass has issued a Fact Check to his responses and the subsequent press in the New York Times and Palm Beach Post:

WRScompass FACT CHECK in response to recent comments made by Bud Chiles

·WRScompass has a long standing partnership with the State of Florida, having been awarded state-wide contracts with Florida DEP and Florida DOT since the Lawton Chiles Administration.

·WRS Infrastructure & Environmental, d/b/a WRScompass has been based in Tampa, Florida (NOT North Carolina) since 1983.

·WRScompass has been an EPA Region 4 Federal Emergency and Rapid Response contractor since 1984.

·WRScompass appreciates the opportunity to work with the state of Florida, any explanation of the Florida DEP contract should be and has been explained by Florida DEP.

·Kathleen Shanahan, Chair of the Board and CEO of WRSC since 2005, has a distinguished record of public service in Florida and at the national level that includes:

o2001-2003 Chief of Staff,  Florida Governor Jeb Bush

o2004 Former Chief of Staff,  Vice President - Elect Dick Cheney

o5 year Board Member of the Florida State Board of Education

oBoard member, National Parks Foundation

If there are any questions, please contact:

 

Robert Armstead

Manager of Public Affairs and Corporate Sustainability

rarmstead@wrscompass.com

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A Daunting Start of Summer for 5 Gulf State Governors

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. , SHAILA DEWAN and DAMIEN CAVE

If all politics is local, then the politics of disaster is personal.

This weekend should mark the unofficial inaugural celebrations of summer, especially in the states along the sultry Gulf of Mexico, so used to beaches and barbecues. Instead they are filled with a very different kind of anticipation.

Few know those stakes better than the governors of the Gulf Five. They are all Republicans, but of different stripes and shades. Most of them have changed their response to the spill as the scope of the disaster has grown more undeniably dire.

An account of how they have weathered the political storm so far:

GOV. BOBBY JINDAL Standing in the sun, tieless, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana rattles off a list of statistics: this many feet of boom requested, this many feet of boom received, this many feet of boom sitting useless on the dock. This many miles of coastline affected by oil - with heavy oil seen here, here and here.

And, at every occasion, the sum of the collected data: "This spill," Mr. Jindal says, "fundamentally threatens our way of life."

The oil slick, like Hurricane Katrina before it, is a big, impending disaster swirling in from the Gulf of Mexico, requiring a response effort involving all levels of government.

The flawed response to the hurricane badly damaged the political fortunes of both President George W. Bush, a Republican, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, a Democrat, helping pave the wave for younger, fresh faces like Barack Obama and Mr. Jindal.

Now this.

Mr. Jindal, a Republican with national ambition, is not going to leave room for anyone to say that he was not vigorously engaged, did not appreciate the threat or did not know the facts - every single fact - on the ground. Almost daily he tours the coast by helicopter or boat, then returns to land and holds a news conference, surrounded by angry mayors and parish officials who take turns describing the inadequacy of the response effort.

Mr. Jindal stands alongside administration officials when they visit and thanks them for being on the scene, but from early in the crisis he has criticized the authorities for not responding with urgency to the state's needs.

The primary cudgel has become a proposal to dredge sand and erect artificial barrier islands to keep oil offshore, a plan that has its detractors but has become an article of faith among state officials and local parish leaders.

The persistent hammering has worked, to a degree. Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, the incident commander, said on Thursday that he was reorganizing officers to address complaints that the response effort had been disjointed and slow. And he has given approval to erect one sand barrier out of the six permitted by the Army Corps of Engineers. State officials want 24.

Mr. Jindal did not let up.

"Had we been given approval earlier, we could have built nearly 10 miles of barriers six feet high already," he told reporters in Port Fourchon.

Last weekend, officials from Jefferson Parish and the mayor of Grand Isle, La., declared they were commandeering 40 fishing boats that were signed up to work on the cleanup but were sitting idle as oil seeped into the bays. BP eventually put them to work.

Asked what he would have done if the mayor had been arrested for such a move, Mr. Jindal sounded like the kind of populist warrior that Louisiana has been particularly fertile in producing.

"I told the mayor yesterday," Mr. Jindal said, "if I had the power, I'd pardon him."

CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

GOV. RICK PERRY It is no secret that Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, a staunch conservative Republican, is pro-business; he often rails against what he sees as onerous environmental regulations. Neither is it a secret that big oil wields enormous influence in Texas politics. After all, most of the billionaires in the state sprang from the oil business, and they are the ones who finance campaigns.

Still, for the leader of the state with hundreds of miles of coastline on the gulf, Mr. Perry has been unusually quiet about the Deepwater Horizon spill and has made no move to publicly chastise the companies responsible.

Two weeks after the rig sank and oil started gushing into the gulf, Mr. Perry called the accident "an act of God" and warned the federal government not to be too hasty in halting offshore drilling operations until the cause was known. "I hope we don't see a knee-jerk reaction across this country that says we're going to shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, because the cost to this country will be staggering," he said.

When reporters asked the next day what he meant, he dug in his heels. "Nobody knows what happened, and I said that in my remarks, that there was a lot of speculation. It could have been an act of God, it could have been, you know, who knows?" he said.

That remark drew hoots and catcalls from Democrats, chief among them his Democratic opponent this year, former Mayor Bill White of Houston, who laid out a blueprint for investigating the disaster in a 10-page memorandum.

Mr. Perry has not changed his position much since then, preferring to stay out of the debate over what BP and its contractors might have done right or wrong.

JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

GOV. HALEY BARBOUR Then there's Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

The governors of neighboring states have expressed grave concern at the sight of the oil slick in the gulf and have emphasized it as a potentially catastrophic threat as they entertain costly, involved and untested proposals that could keep the oil from hitting the shores of their states.

And while officials next door in Louisiana have railed against BP and the government for not acting with enough urgency, Mr. Barbour's main theme is quite the opposite. Overreaction, he cautions, is the real peril.

"A bunch of liberal elites were hoping this would be the Three Mile Island of offshore drilling," he said last week to a gathering of the Mississippi Manufacturers Association, according to The Biloxi Sun-Herald.

The oil slick has threatened coasts like a drunk with a pistol - now aiming it directly at Mississippi, now at Florida, now bearing down on Louisiana. But other than reports of tar balls, it has not made a direct hit on the Mississippi coastline, a fact Mr. Barbour repeats as part of his keep-calm-and-carry-on message.

"We haven't had a milk jug full of oil that's got on our coast," he said at a news conference in Biloxi on Thursday, much of which was dedicated to a fact-filled defense of offshore drilling.

Over the weeks that the nation has been watching the uncertain trajectory of the oil in the gulf, Mississippi has faced far more tangible devastation, as a series of tornadoes have left 16 people dead and stretched the resources of the state's emergency responders, who are also monitoring the coast.

Addressing the oil spill, Mr. Barbour has delivered briefings alongside Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, requested federal relief for businesses along the coast and appeared with his wife in a BP-financed advertising campaign encouraging tourists to keep coming to the Mississippi coast.

But while he has acknowledged the harm the spill could do to the state's tourism economy, he has frequently accused the news media of exaggerations. He has described the layer of oil in the gulf as "very, very, very thin" and brushed aside comparisons to the Exxon Valdez as hyperbolic. (That was before federal estimates released on Thursday showed the spill had far eclipsed the Valdez in volume.)

At the news conference in Biloxi on Thursday, Mr. Barbour opened with two points. First of all, the top kill procedure seemed to be working. Second, in light of the president's call for a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling, he asked that drilling in shallow waters be opened up again.

CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

GOV. BOB RILEY On a recent day on Dauphin Island, Ala., a man named Dan Parker demonstrated how the powdered polymer made by his company, C.I.Agent Solutions, could turn oil into a gelatinous solid that could be picked up off the surface of water. Why, a reporter wanted to know, was it being used in Alabama instead of Louisiana? Because, Mr. Parker said, "The governor requested us. BP deployed us first to Louisiana, then Alabama stepped up to the plate and said, ‘We'll take all you got.' "

He added, "The governor decided he wanted it before the other governor decided he wanted it."

Gov. Bob Riley, a Republican nearing the end of his second and final term, has been aggressive about protecting Alabama's small but ecologically rich segment of the Gulf Coast, deploying the National Guard and troops of Tyvek-clad contractors. He made his first flyover April 28 and has visited the coast 17 times since then, his spokesman said.

The visibility may help improve a reputation that was ravaged by the governor's spoilsport role in a complicated battle over electronic bingo, an issue that has far more traction in the race to succeed him than the oil spill, which has not seemed to register as a big political issue with voters despite a looming primary, according to Gerald W. Johnson, the director of the Capital Survey Research Center.

It has not seemed to matter that some of Mr. Riley's ideas have not gone well, like his plan to prevent any oil from entering Mobile Bay by using booms and gates. The booms proved impossible to anchor in the strong current.

Casi Callaway, the executive director of Mobile Baykeeper, an environmental group, said she could have told him that would happen - if she and others with coastal expertise had been consulted. But they have had a difficult time getting through to the decision makers, she said.

"For presence, he gets a 100," Ms. Callaway said. "He's flying the area and saying, ‘We need protection there,' and pointing, and it's happening to a large degree. But it's not always the areas that are more visible that are more meaningful to protect."

Unlike some of his peers, Mr. Riley, 65, has not lashed out at BP or the Obama administration - in fact, he has praised both for their responsiveness to the state's needs. Since the spill, he has had second thoughts about offshore drilling, which he once vehemently supported.

SHAILA DEWAN

GOV. CHARLIE CRIST In June 2008, with gas prices at $4 a gallon, Gov. Charlie Crist softened his opposition to offshore drilling because, he said, "we have to be sympathetic to the pocketbooks of Floridians and what they're paying at the pump for gas, and balance that with any way that our state might be able to contribute in terms of resources."

Now Mr. Crist says "all bets are off." Under pressure from Democrats and environmentalists - whom he might need in his independent run for the United States Senate - he has stepped up his anti-drilling remarks, his coastal appearances, and his plans for how to respond. For weeks, he has been saying he wants to bring lawmakers back to Tallahassee for a special session focused on a proposed constitutional ban on offshore drilling, and on tax incentives that would encourage renewable energy sources.

"If the oil starts hitting our shores, he will probably do it, because the economic consequences will be brutal," said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida.

Mr. Crist has been criticized by some for not moving fast enough and forcefully enough to prepare plans to protect Florida's coast or tourism economy. Lawton Chiles III, the son of Florida's former Democratic governor, who is now considering a run for that position, said Mr. Crist should have already set up a commission to vet oil prevention and cleanup plans by cities and counties.

Instead, Mr. Chiles said, the state is paying $250,000 for technical assistance to a consulting firm, WRS Compass, run by Kathleen Shanahan, the chief of staff for Dick Cheney during the 2000 campaign, and later, Gov. Jeb Bush.

This week at a cabinet meeting, Republicans and Democrats also attacked Mr. Crist for failing to quickly deploy a promised $25 million payment from BP for advertisements about how Florida's beaches had not been affected by the spill. Don Gaetz, a Republican from the Panhandle, questioned why advertisements were not already up, encouraging tourists not to cancel trips to the state's northwest coast this weekend.

"It seems that the state of Florida has not stepped up," Mr. Gaetz said. Other officials agreed - leading Mr. Crist to scramble for a response. Within a few hours, he had announced that the money had been received, and that along with ads, live video feeds would be used to show that the beaches were unharmed.

DAMIEN CAVE

 

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