TRACY — Growing up on the family ranch here, Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy) says, he learned that "you have to work till you're done. There's nobody else to pick up the slack."
It's a lesson he carried from the fields of the northern San Joaquin Valley to the committee rooms of Congress, where for more than a decade he has doggedly labored to undo one of America's signature environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act.
After finally getting a bill through the House last fall that would eliminate habitat protections on more than 150 million acres, Pombo has never been closer to reaching his goal. But as the Senate prepares to take up his measure this year, Pombo finds himself on the defensive, with his ideology increasingly viewed as extreme and his connections to industry and to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff under scrutiny.
A seven-term Republican and chairman of the influential House Resources Committee, Pombo is a tax-cutting, anti-abortion, anti-gun-control conservative. But it is the 33-year-old species law that has been his political obsession. He has argued that it puts "endangered flies, beetles, rats and shellfish" before people. He has exaggerated the law's impact on his own land.
Besides curbing protections, his bill would require the federal government to pay owners for any restrictions on the use of their property.
"It took me 13 years to get to that point," Pombo said recently, sitting in the backroom of a Tracy restaurant, where burlap seed bags decorated the clapboard walls and old farmers swapped jokes over afternoon coffee.
Now though, instead of focusing on carrying his win to the Senate, he finds himself facing questions about his efforts on behalf of Abramoff clients. And a series of legislative maneuvers late last year called attention to what critics say is his record of pushing proposals that benefit his primary campaign contributors: agribusiness, the oil and gas industry, builders, utilities and mining.
In November, Pombo tacked onto a budget bill provisions to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and expand oil and gas drilling off the nation's coastlines, including California's. Another rider would have reversed a long-standing moratorium on selling federal mineral lands to mining companies and opened up public lands to private development. And budget language drafted by Pombo's staff -- but never introduced -- would have sold 15 national parks to raise federal revenue.
