Gen. George S. Patton once said that, "The purpose of winning battles is to make headlines." Gen. Patton understood the importance of public opinion. He knew that a good headline would build the public support he needed to procure the men and materials that would be necessary for his next battle, and eventually for winning the war against Nazi Germany.

The purpose of filing high visibility lawsuits is not that different from what Patton described. Lawsuits on that level affect public opinion. The very act of filing a high profile lawsuit brings public attention to an issue. The other purpose of a prominent lawsuit is to buy time in which the public debate can mature and change.

Both of those outcomes will flow from the lawsuit filed Monday by a consortium of environmental groups. As reported by Mike Stark, those lawsuits contest the validity of the National Marine Fisheries Service's review of the Columbia River channel deepening project.

They allege that NMFS' review is illegal, deeply flawed and not based on sound science.

Within the confines of Oregon politics alone, the lawsuit had tangible effect one day after it was filed. The lawsuit forced The Oregonian on its own front page to acknowledge that there is legitimate opposition to channel deepening. For a newspaper that has avoided skeptical coverage of the Port of Portland for decades, that front page story amounted to a reluctant admission that the newspaper had barely informed its readers that something big was going on.

Suddenly on Tuesday morning all across metropolitan Portland and western Oregon, people became aware of a major conflict that has been largely hidden from view. That is an enormous effect when you remember that as recently as four years ago the major environmentalist organizations would not take the channel deepening issue seriously.
Lawsuits that challenge federal processes are instruments of delay and clarification. And when the Endangered Species Act is at the heart of a lawsuit, those federal processes can be delayed permanently.

The channel deepening project has been first of all a political process, whose prime mover has been the Port of Portland. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has only done the bidding of the port. But in that process the corps has written an environmental impact statement whose inadequacies are egregious. Like the Port of Portland, the corps has barely examined options that would obviate the need for channel deepening. Options such as a topping-off facility at the river's mouth. The fix was in.

For those of us who live at the mouth of the Columbia River, this is a remarkable moment. Finally, a federal court will examine a process that has assumed that the rest of us are ignorant, stupid and gullible.

2/17/00 The Daily Astorian

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