Image Over Substance

by Nate Blakeslee

Rick Perry

Referring to a long- forgotten 1990 campaign poster from Rick Perry's first bid for agriculture commissioner -- which featured a grinning, fence-straddling Perry decked out in chaps, tight-fitting Wranglers, and cowboy hat -- a certain Texas state representative reportedly told the editor of TheTexas Observer that she detected a suspicious deviation between what might be termed the image and the substance of the man in question. "I know from experience," she said, indicating the operative portion of the future commissioner's jeans, "that that's not all Rick Perry."

That's one issue that is unlikely to be settled before the coming election for lieutenant governor. But if anything can offset the considerable advantage that Governor Bush's coattails would seem to offer Perry, it may be similar perceptions of a lack of substance -- in experience, performance, and philosophy -- that seem to have accompanied Perry throughout his career. Now that he faces John Sharp, who is widely considered -- by both Democrats and Republicans -- to be an extremely competent administrator, Perry's tenure at the Department of Agriculture has been thrown into relief, and the spotlight has not been kind to him.

It's bad enough that the farmworkers and the environmentalists don't like him. "He's ripped our guts out down here," says Ray Gill of the United Farm Workers in the Valley, referring to Perry's sweeping deregulation of the pesticide industry. But Perry has also been snubbed by the Texas Farm Bureau (TFB), the agribusiness interest group that virtually bought Perry's narrow victory over Jim Hightower in 1990. According to the October issue of TFB's Texas Neighbors, the reason the group endorsed Sharp this time around is simple: Perry was a pretty poor agriculture commissioner. In addition to regulating pesticide use, the commissioner's main job is to promote Texas agriculture. But Perry failed to deliver on his promise to bring agricultural processing jobs to Texas. His management of the Texas Agricultural Finance Authority (TAFA) has been questioned by the state auditor. And he stumped for the banks on the issue of home equity loans, which the Farm Bureau has always opposed as inimical to family farmers.

Perry, nevertheless, is a popular contender in the race, with the latest polls showing a dead-even split between Perry and Sharp. And just as Sharp has revved up his attack ads on Perry in the waning days of the campaign, Perry's donors have become increasingly more generous, dumping about $1.6 million into his coffers in the last reporting cycle. Overall, each candidate has raised about $9 million. Perry, it is widely believed, was Bush's choice for the lieutenant governor's seat to ensure Republican control over Texas should Bush run for president in 2000.

But just as Sharp is attacking Perry at every turn, so too are others who had dealings with him during his twice-elected tenure as agriculture commissioner. If the people he worked for don't want him, and the people he worked against hate him, what about the people who worked for him, the employees of the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA)? There are several whom Perry would rather you didn't ask.

One of them is Benny Fisher, now the sheriff of Delta County, a triangle of small East Texas cotton communities wedged between two branches of the Sulphur River, about 75 miles east of Dallas. Fisher worked for Perry at TDA from January of 1991, when Perry entered office, until September of 1993, when Fisher was fired. Hired in 1981 by Perry's predecessor, Jim Hightower, Fisher spent his last five years at the department as a pesticide enforcement field investigator in the Tyler district, which spanned most of the cotton-producing counties in East Texas.

Monitoring pesticide use is the primary regulatory function performed by TDA, and the legwork is mainly carried out by a small group of field agents. When the department receives a complaint, more often than not involving incidents of pesticide "drift" (whereby one farmer's crops or livestock are poisoned by a neighbor's pesticide application), a field agent is sent out to collect samples and conduct interviews. By all accounts, Fisher was good at his job. "Benny was real diligent and hard-working," recalls Cordelia Martinez, a former TDA attorney who worked with Fisher. "Benny Fisher was one of the best," says another former co-worker, Leroy Biggers, now Tyler regional director for the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC). "And whatever he tells you is true," Biggers adds. Fisher is frankly proud of his record. "Out of 28 state inspectors, I filed more complaints, made better cases, and collected more in fine money than anyone in the state," Fisher, now 56, said in an interview at his home in Cooper.

Fisher's last major investigation, begun under Hightower, concerned allegations of illegal waste dumping by the largest pesticide manufacturer in the state. According to Fisher, his superiors at TDA buried the investigation almost immediately after Perry took office. And shortly thereafter, they buried Benny Fisher.

On December 6, 1988, Fisher received a call from Allen Hayes, a young, inexperienced Texas Water Commission investigator, asking for assistance on an investigation of arsenic contamination at a pesticide manufacturing plant outside of Bonham. The plant was owned by Voluntary Purchasing Group, maker of over 200 types of agricultural chemicals, including liquid arsenic acid, produced by only one other company in the United States. Until the practice was banned in 1993, generations of Texas cotton farmers used arsenic acid to dry out the bolls of their cotton plants prior to harvesting them. Accompanied by Hayes, Fisher arrived unannounced at the Bonham plant and informed VPG president Mike Smith that he had come to do an inspection. Smith reluctantly acquiesced, and Fisher and Hayes toured the 500 acres surrounding the plant, taking soil samples from the pasture, water samples from a couple of creeks, and tissue samples from a dead cow. After lab analysis, all of the samples showed elevated levels of arsenic.

Fisher interviewed neighbors and past employees of the plant over the course of the next year, collecting sworn eyewitness accounts of alleged illegal dumping of arsenic waste, both at the current site, and at a previous site in downtown Bonham. Fisher was also tipped off about an old VPG disposal site in the unincorporated community of Ridgeway, about 25 miles from Bonham, which had allegedly contaminated neighboring farms and the local water supply.

Fisher also interviewed neighbors who said they had lost livestock as a result of contaminated runoff from VPG's land. "They saved millions of dollars by not shipping it down to Deer Park for proper disposal. But they cost the citizens of Fannin County plenty," Fisher said. A known carcinogen, arsenic is a heavy metal that is nearly insoluble and non-biodegradable. "That arsenic will be there when Jesus gets back," Fisher said. Fisher turned in his finished report in 1990. "With the samples, the sworn statements, and everything, I had as good a case as any I'd ever worked," he said. Yet by the time Fisher was fired in 1993, nothing had been done with the case. In 1995, Rick Perry claimed that the Attorney General's Office was sitting on the case, but Fisher believes it was Perry who did the sitting.

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Perry's Past

Before Rick Perry was agriculture commissioner, before he was even a Republican, he was a friend of the pesticide industry. As a Democratic state representative from Haskell County, a farming region near Abilene, Perry challenged Hightower's zealous enforcement of pesticide regulations, introducing to the legislature a provision that would have gutted the department's pesticide authority. That was in 1989. In 1990, Perry became a Republican and announced his bid to unseat Hightower. The Farm Bureau poured tens of thousands of dollars into Perry's campaign. They weren't the only ones. "VPG hated Jim Hightower," Fisher says. VPG owner Dean Smith kicked in $25,000 to Perry's campaign. It paid off. A year later, the man who would have removed regulatory authority over pesticides from the Agriculture Department was running the show.

Former TDA enforcement officer Benny Fisher claims his superiors covered up his investigation into aresnic dumping at the VPG Superfund Site in Commerce, Texas. photograph by Nate Blakeslee

According to Fisher, it was two of Perry's new appointees, Barry McBee and Larry Beauchamp, who covered up the VPG case. Fisher says deputy commissioner McBee (who would leave the agency in 1995 to become the state's top environmental officer as chair of the TNRCC) dismissed the case in a 1991 meeting in Austin. Special assistant Beauchamp (an ex-cop from Perry's home county who calls himself "Rick's Right Hand") later confiscated all of the files pertaining to the case at a meeting in Tyler in April of 1992, says Fisher. Before the Tyler meeting, Fisher made a photocopy of his file, which is now in the possession of the Houston law firm of McClanahan and Clearman, who are representing several plaintiffs in VPG-related suits.

In 1995, VPG agreed to settle one of the complaints raised by Benny Fisher's original investigation, involving the sale of arsenic-tainted fertilizer, for $30,000. But no agency has ever taken enforcement action regarding the more serious allegations of illegal dumping in Bonham and contamination in Ridgeway. A June 30 press release from the TNRCC announced that the Attorney General's Office had managed to extract $2.5 million from VPG in bankruptcy court. (Although the company declared bankruptcy in 1996, it continues to operate in Bonham.) But according to the AG's office, that money was collected solely to compensate the state for expenses incurred in the 1995 cleanup of an old site in Commerce, Texas, abandoned by the company in 1972. The Bonham and Ridgeway sites, on the other hand, have been placed in the TNRCC's voluntary cleanup plan.

Perry, speaking through TDA attorney Wil Galloway, denies that Fisher's files were confiscated. (McBee also claims no knowledge of that action, nor could he recall dismissing the case in a meeting in 1991.) Galloway said Fisher was removed from the case because the company had alleged misconduct by Fisher, which might have affected his credibility at trial. As it happened, however, no trial ever occurred. Galloway also claimed that allegations pertaining to illegal dumping were handed over to the Texas Water Commission. But as late as 1993, the Water Commission's successor agency, the TNRCC, was claiming that the Ridgeway site was "just discovered," and that files pertaining to the case had been "lost."

"All my life, I always thought that the law was for everyone to follow," says Fisher, who was a sheriff for 12 years before joining TDA. "But it don't work that way at TDA If you've got big money, you're cool. If you've got political pull, you're cool." Fisher was fired in June of 1993 for an unrelated incident -- a complaint from a farmer under investigation by Fisher -- that he says was merely an excuse to get rid of him. Says Fisher, "The only thing I can say is, I got one vote, that's all I got, but I'd sure hate to see Rick Perry as lieutenant governor."

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Nate Blakeslee is a staff writer for The Texas Observer, where a version of this story first appeared.