Sparks fly at breakfast with Congressman Wu


Oregon First District Congressman David Wu walked into a hornet’s nest when he attended a June 1 breakfast with Portland-area labor leaders. The event was sponsored by the Northwest Oregon Labor Council (NOLC) at Kirkland Union Manor in Southeast Portland.

Wu wanted to talk about the Central American Free Trade Agreement (he’s opposed to it) and Social Security privatization (he’s opposed to it) and coming legislation on pensions (he’s watching it closely).

But the breakfast kept coming back to something else Wu opposes: A bid by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs to build a casino in the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area. Wu has spoken out strongly against the casino, which would be built in an industrial park at Cascade Locks, 43 miles east of Portland on Interstate 84, in the Second Congressional District represented by Republican Greg Walden.

Cascade Locks is not on tribal land, and gambling is regulated, so before the casino can go ahead, it needs state and federal government approval.

After 18 months of meetings with state officials, a compact was signed by Governor Ted Kulongoski and the tribe on April 6. The compact calls for a land swap — plus a complex arrangement to share casino revenues with the state.

It also includes a project labor agreement between building trades unions and general contractor Anderson Construction, and a neutrality agreement with UNITE HERE Local 9, the union that represents hotel and restaurant employees. Union officials said the 500-square-foot casino and hotel would mean 1.7 million hours of work for about 400 construction workers, plus as many as 1,000 hotel and casino jobs.

Local 9 would have to wait eight months after the complex opens before attempting to organize the workforce.

Opponents of the casino include other Oregon tribes, environmentalists, religious and other anti-gambling groups, and the Oregon Restaurant Association, which represents establishments that stand to lose lottery profits.

In negotiations with Kulongoski, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs said that if it was allowed to build a casino at Cascade Locks, it would close its casino in Central Oregon and would not build on tribal land at a site near Hood River, where it has an undisputed right to locate a casino. The Hood River site is 20 miles farther east on I-84 and is considered more sensitive environmentally.

Once the compact with the state was approved, the tribe submitted its proposal to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton for approval.

Wu wrote Norton a letter opposing the plan, and twice spoke against the casino on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, and tried to insert an amendment to a budget bill that would have outlawed off-reservation casinos. It’s not clear that the opposition from a Democratic congressman outside the affected district was a factor in her decision, but on May 20, Norton turned down the Warm Springs proposal.

At the Wu breakfast, sparks flew.

“Why didn’t you speak up 18 months ago?” asked Bruce Temple, business manager of Cement Masons Local 555. “We weren’t talking behind closed doors.”

Wu loudly defended his position: A casino would harm the environment by increasing traffic congestion and air pollution in the Gorge.

“I very much respect your need to keep folks employed,” Wu said, “but I’m not willing to do whatever it takes to get any job. In this case it’s about the Gorge, the crown jewel of Oregon …. It’d be like building a casino in the Yosemite Valley.”

Building trades union leaders were unpersuaded, and the criticisms continued.

“Go ahead. Bring me home,” Wu said. “The only thing I’ll miss is not having a national platform on China.”

Wu, who is Chinese-American, has been a persistent critic of China’s human rights record.

Wu said he’d had conversations with the Warm Springs Tribe going back to 1999 discouraging them from attempting to build in the Gorge.

“I don’t think anyone knows about those conversations,” said tribal spokesman Len Bergstein, who attended the labor breakfast. Bergstein formerly worked as public affairs consultant for the Grand Ronde Tribe and now works for the Confederated Tribe of Warm Springs. [In 2003, the Oregon and Washington state labor federations passed resolutions discouraging affiliates from doing business with Bergstein because of work he performed for anti-union Threemile Canyon Farm dairy in Boardman, Oregon.]

Bergstein told the NW Labor Press the Cascade Locks proposal isn’t dead: he was assured by a deputy secretary of the Interior that the department will take another look later on.

While the casino issue dominated the two-hour meeting, there were other issues.

Members of Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 11 and Laborers Local 296 criticized Wu for a letter his office sent to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons on behalf of Andrew Wiederhorn, asking that the financier felon be released to a half-way house in order to get better treatment for diabetes. Wiederhorn is serving an 18-month prison sentence for tax evasion and giving an illegal gratuity. The charges are related to Wiederhorn’s role in the failure of Capital Consultants, an investment management firm that invested union pension funds. Investors lost an estimated $350 million to a Ponzi-like scheme Capital set up to hide a series of bad loans to Wiederhorn.

Also convicted in conjunction with Capital’s collapse were John Abbott, a former executive secretary-treasurer and pension trustee of the Laborers District Council; and former Capital Consultants vice president Dean Kirkland, son of former Local 11 chief Gary Kirkland; Barclay Grayson, son of Capital founder Jeff Grayson; and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers trustee Robert Legino of Denver.

NOLC Executive Secretary-Treasurer Judy O’Connor, a former trustee for the Local 11 fund, said Wu’s letter showed bad judgment.

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Wu said. “I never took a fishing trip with Andy.”

Wiederhorn, who is reportedly a childhood friend of Wu’s wife, contributed $8,000 to Wu election campaigns prior to the Capital collapse. After the collapse, Wu bought 200 shares of stock in Wiederhorn’s new venture, Fog Cutter Capital Group.

Wiederhorn and Fog Cutter were placed on the “Unfair/Do Not Patronize List” of the Oregon AFL-CIO in June 2004.

Wu said he will be running for reelection in 2006.

On most issues in Congress, he’s considered an ally of labor.

Union political action committees were the biggest contributors to Wu’s 2004 re-election campaign, giving $267,500.

Wu votes with labor most of the time. Over the course of four terms in Congress, Wu’s votes were consistent with the AFL-CIO’s position 87 percent of the time. That places him in the middle of Oregon representatives, behind Earl Blumenauer and Peter DeFazio, but ahead of Walden and Democrat Darlene Hooley.

Wu has spoken out strongly against proposals to divert Social Security revenues into private investment accounts, which unions have made a top priority to oppose.

In the past, Wu, a former trade attorney, has voted for some trade agreements opposed by labor. But with CAFTA, the new NAFTA-like trade treaty with Central America, Wu said he plans to vote against it.

“The problem with our trade policy is that there are winners and losers in the global economy,” Wu told union leaders June 1. “We should not be doing trade agreements with countries where little blind kids are stitching soccer balls together.”


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