In the really green part of Oregon, Gordon Smith has a long tradition of presenting himself as the moderate, anti-drilling, good guy. In fact, one of his infamous ads in which he tries to pretend he's been endorsed by Obama, trumpets
"Who says Gordon Smith helped lead the fight for better gas mileage and a cleaner environment? Barack Obama!"
Clean environment? Tell that to the Oregon Department of Environmental Equality, not to mention the folks in Weston, OR.
For the second time in about a year, wastewater from the frozen-foods plant owned and operated in Eastern Oregon by the family of U.S. Sen Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) overflowed into a nearby creek in violation of state environmental regulations....
Smith Frozen Foods has a long history of wastewater violations.... According to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, an employee of Smith Frozen Foods contacted the state agency on July 29 (while the plant was processing corn) to report an overflow from the company's wastewater lagoon that "resulted in a milky discharge to Pine Creek."
...[T]he incident is considered a serious "Class 1" violation, meaning it "can harm aquatic life, contaminate drinking waters, and impair recreational, commercial and agricultural uses of water."...
On July 30, 2007, at the height of last year's corn season, Smith Frozen Foods had a similar violation. That violation resulted in a $3,000 fine — a small sum compared with the $25,000 DEQ fine in 1992 for another infraction. Between those two events, Smith Frozen Foods has been cited or fined by the DEQ more than a handful times.
After one of those fines in the early 1990s, Smith received $766,000 in state and federal grants to bring his plant into compliance with environmental regs. And then he had the gall to run his first, losing campaign against Wyden on "the principles of less government and unfettered free enterprise."
The most recent spill (there have been six or seven in the past 15 years) is hardly the same scope as the massive fish kill of 2002 that Smith helped engineer with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, an environmental and economic disaster that killed over 60,000 fish, including naturally raised Chinook and endangered Coho salmon.
But it does put the lie to Smith's claim that he's a friend to the environment. And it's one of the reasons Oregon's environmental and conservation communities are lining up behind Jeff Merkley.