by Audrey Duff
Clad
in a worn tweed
jacket with a wool muffler warming his thin neck and wearing glasses thick as
coke bottles, T. Paul Robbins stuck out like a nun in a whorehouse among the
dark-suited lawyers gathered in the corporate digs of Austin’s Graves,
Dougherty, Hearon & Moody last month. Robbins, who has spent countless
hours during the last seven years exposing allegations of safety problems at
the South Texas Project (STP) nuclear plant, sat at a conference table and
looked vulnerable as Mike Diehl, an attorney for STP managing partner Houston
Lighting & Power (HL&P), began to fire questions as crisp as his
starched shirt.
Robbins was compelled to answer the HL&P lawyer’s questions as part of the
utility’s defense against a $125 million dollar mismanagement lawsuit brought
against HL&P by the City of Austin, for lengthy shutdowns at the plant.
(Austin is a 16% partner in STP.) Why depose “No Nuke” activists? HL&P
attorneys say there’s a conspiracy going on between the Austin City
councilmembers and local anti-nuke activists to harass and disrupt the Houston
utility. And that Austin’s alleged collusion with the activists proves they
were a bad-faith partner. But more likely, say others, HL&P wants to paint
the City of Austin with the wide brush of activism to avoid answering the
subject of mismanagement.
As in most depositions, Diehl’s questions to Robbins were all over the map.
Some were eye-rollingly redundant, such as the following:
Diehl: In your view, how many nuclear plants should there be?
Robbins: None.
Diehl: In your view, they should all be shut down?
Robbins: Yes, sir.
Diehl: [Do] you envision that nuclear plants should be closed?
Other questions hit more toward the point:
Diehl: Can you remember any city councilmember you met with who discussed the
advice of attorneys?
Robbins: A few months ago, Brigid Shea told me in a private meeting that…
they could not do an outside investigation [of STP] because somehow that would
jeopardize the city’s legal standing. I was aghast when she said that. I like
her, but… on that particular issue, I’m rather disgusted with her.
Not exactly the chummy conspiracy theory HL&P would have liked to uncover,
but Diehl continued to chip away over the next week at Robbins and three other
environmental activists whose sin appears to be that they have annoyed both
HL&P and the city with their protests and constant calls for a public
investigation of the plant.
“[HL&P] is trying to make the city council out to be this wild-eyed bunch
of radical eco-terrorists controlled by fringe groups, while at the same time
maintaining that the nuke is a wonderfully operating facility,” Robbins’
attorney W. Scott McCollough scoffs. “It’s a smokescreen by HL&P to shift
the focus away from the main issue of whether they were negligent in operating
the plant… [HL&P attorney Roy] Minton’s good at sending lawyers down
rabbit trails like this one.”
“We weren’t being sued, but I definitely felt harassed,” says Robbins, author
of The Environmental Directory, who was among four Austin-based
activists subpoenaed by HL&P to give depositions last month. (The others
were Bill Jackson, director of Austin’s Greenpeace; Tom “Smitty” Smith, Austin
director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, and Les Breeding,
formerly with the Texas Nuclear Responsibility Network. HL&P tried to serve
local political theatre actress Susan Lee with a subpoena, but, despite
numerous tries, was unable to catch up with her.)
The environmental activists, who often go unpaid, may have had good reason to
feel harassed and outgunned with high-dollar attorneys like Minton snapping at
their heels. Austin Chronicle writer Andrea Barnett reported last August
that Minton was adamant at a hearing before District Judge Scott McCown that
the five STP opponents be forced to give depositions and fork over mounds of
personal notes and correspondence — anything that had anything to do with STP.
At that hearing, Barnett overhead Minton whisper loudly to two of his
associates: “I don’t care about their first amendment rights, I’m going to
depose those individuals.”
All five activists describe their worries over paying legal fees (they are
thinking of holding a fundraiser), and missing work. In addition to time spent
in depositions, all of the activists spent hours poring over their personal
files for STP-related materials. But what concerned them most, they say, was
the possibility that HL&P was using the depositions as a way to gather
intelligence for other lawsuits regarding other environmental little guys. “We
were worried that [HL&P was] using the depositions as a fishing expedition
to find out how much we really knew about the plant, and to uncover our
contacts with whistleblowers [who work at STP],” explains Public Citizen’s
Smith, who was deposed by HL&P December 1. “I lost more than a couple
nights sleep.”
Fortunately, says McCollough, who represented three of the activists in their
depositions, HL&P lawyers lost the battle over the scope of discovery
before Judge McCown, and were therefore limited in what they could ask. “I’m
convinced [HL&P lawyers] were after more than just stuff for this lawsuit,”
McCollough says. “I doubt that Roy Minton would have showed up at the hearing
if he wasn’t hoping to win access to information to defend HL&P in the
whistleblower cases he’s handling.”
Minton did not return phone calls from the Chronicle. Court papers
filed by HL&P arguing the need for a broad scope of discovery, however,
gave a different reason for the depositions’ usefulness. According to an
October 27 motion, the depositions were calculated to uncover a conspiracy
HL&P lawyers say may have existed between the city council and local
activists. Activists like Robbins “may have at times acted in concert with
Austin in activities… potentially detrimental to STP, or which resulted in
increased costs for STP, or which were inconsistent with the cities’ duties to
the co-owners of STP,” contend HL&P attorneys.
The notion that the city was somehow dictating the behavior of the activists
is laughable, they say. “We are supposed to have been the pawns of the city
council,” smirks Robbins. “That’s pretty far-fetched when you realize that
we’ve disagreed on what should be done with the nuke for years.” (Austin has
been advocating relinquishing all ties with the nuke by selling it, while the
activists have pushed for an active partnership in which Austin demands and
conducts an on-site inspection and investigation of alleged safety violations,
followed by a forced shut-down.)
Still, HL&P attorneys have gotten at least one potentially damaging city
document out of discovery. One interesting line of questioning pursued with all
four deponents had to do with notes made by an unnamed city staffer in
preparation for a council executive session. The handwritten document describes
the need to discuss “strategy options” in dealing with STP: “Discuss… real
vs. perceived ability of Austin to motivate HLP to buy us out in order to not
deal with the nuscince [sic] of our ownership activities.” The next page reads,
“Meet with community activists to listen to their viewpoints and see if they
have any ideas that the group can utilize as part of our strategy.”
The smoking gun Diehl is looking for? Not according to Robbins, who says, “I
don’t know which is more stupid — that someone would write that, or that
someone would believe it.”
“At best,” McCollough says, “That document could indicate that the city may
have encouraged folks to do what they would have done anyway.”
During Breeding’s deposition, he was shown a videotape of himself speaking on
the dais at a council meeting in which he refers to the city’s lawsuit against
HL&P as a “nuisance” suit to make HL&P want to buy the city out. “The
[HL&P] lawyer tried to connect the fact that I used the word “nuisance” in
public once in the last two years with that [city] document,” Breeding says.
“The thing is, we were opposed to that strategy.”
Other questions spun off into the realm of humor, like when Diehl asked about
the anti-nuclear creature called the Energy Dragon, the three-person costume
that activists don to make a splash at council meetings. Judge James Meyers,
the judge who presided over the depositions, “asked if the council really
allowed a dragon to sign up to speak at public meetings,” recalls Greenpeace’s
Jackson. “He couldn’t believe it.”
Perhaps most troublesome to the environmentalists — who, by carrying signs
and screaming anti-corporate slogans, have been a thorn in the sides of many a
multi-million dollar conglomerate — is the ominous consequence of their
activism. Finding themselves a target of well-heeled lawyers was not something
they relished. Mostly, they say, it sends a message to other safe-energy
advocates with little income to watch what they say. “It’s a way to shut people
up,” says Robbins.
Local environmental attorney Bill Bunch does not give the strategy even that
much credibility. “These depositions were of zero value,” he maintains. “The
only issue relevant to this suit, and that will be the focus of the trial in
March, is: Did HL&P operate the plant the way it was supposed to be?”
Dragon suits or no, that is, after all, the point. n
This article appears in December 22 • 1995 and December 22 • 1995 (Cover).