Alan Schreiber pulls up to the curb in a mud-splattered, green, four-door Ford pickup. Formerly on the faculty at Washington State University, where he researched pesticides, Schreiber now does consulting work throughout the state for people who have infestation problems. But his passion is his 156-acre farm outside Pasco, where he grows asparagus, among other crops. Schreiber also heads the state Asparagus and Blueberry Commissions, quasi-public entities that connect growers and the state to government.
Illustration by Tim Gabor
Rossi has painted Murray as a dubious porker in campaign materials.
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Despite having spent several years in academia, with all its alleged liberal bias, Schreiber's politics generally line up with the conservative-leaning part of the state in which he lives. "I voted for Reagan twice," he says. Tea Partier Clint Didier, who failed to advance to the general election, won Franklin County, where Schreiber's farm is located, in the August 17 primary for U.S. Senate with 50 percent of the vote. Three-term Democratic incumbent Patty Murray came in second with 24 percent; Republican challenger Dino Rossi was third with 22 percent.
Don't expect many of those Didier votes to go to Murray in the Nov. 2 general election. "I work with a number of commodity groups in eastern Washington," Schreiber says. "Almost to a man—I don't want to sound sexist, but it's a male kind of world—they tend towards Republicans. And they strongly tend toward fiscal conservatism."
Still, Schreiber says that, come November, Murray will at least get his vote. That's because the earmarks she sends home from the other Washington (D.C.) are the only thing keeping the state's once-thriving asparagus industry alive, according to Schreiber.
In the mid-'90s, he explains, asparagus grew on more than 30,000 acres at some 300 farms. What's more, he says that asparagus is one of the most expensive crops to grow, requiring more people to harvest than other crops—an expensive proposition made even more so due to the state's high minimum wage, which became tied to inflation through a statewide voter initiative in 1998.
According to the federal Department of Labor, Washington now has the highest minimum wage in the U.S. at $8.55 per hour. Because of that, Schreiber says local growers can't compete with farmers in other states or countries like Peru, where harvesters make as little as $5 per day. Unable to recoup the high cost, many local growers have given up. The vegetable is now farmed on only 7,000 acres, according to Schreiber.
In order to be more competitive, he says, farmers still trying to make ends meet with asparagus crops decided to see if they could find a way to use fewer laborers. "The holy grail of the asparagus industry is to come up with a mechanical harvester," Schreiber says.
Individual farmers didn't have the money or expertise to evaluate and build prototypes. So they went to Murray, looking for help paying for the research and materials. She came through, funneling more than $600,000 to the effort since 2001. Using the money and contributions from its members, the Asparagus Commission contracted with a Tri-Cities mechanical company called Mesa Machine and Welding to build a harvester, which has worked exactly as the growers intended. Thanks to that success, the Commission isn't requesting the earmark this year.
Earmarks have become one of the most hotly debated topics in the race between Murray and Rossi. That's in part because Murray has snagged so many of them, managing to secure $219.5 million for 190 separate projects in Congress' final 2010 budget, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. Murray has captured the ninth-highest earmark dollar amount of any senator, according to TCS, which has dubbed her "Pork Patty". (Washington's junior senator, Maria Cantwell, snagged about $89 million for 74 different projects over the same period of time.)
Rossi has run with the "Pork Patty" moniker in campaign materials, claiming that Murray's affinity for earmarks is in part to blame for the nation's $13.6 trillion debt. Rossi also says that earmarks are essentially done in secret for the benefit of big donors. His campaign website includes a page titled "The Case Against Earmarks," where he points to high-profile cases where earmarks went to campaign donors' pet projects, including money for a short-lived Odyssey Maritime Heritage Museum on the downtown Seattle waterfront and speedboats built for the Navy by a Murray donor that the military neither requested nor used.
But not all earmarks are multimillion-dollar gifts to campaign donors. In fact, the vast majority of Murray's $219.5 million haul went to people who didn't give her any money at all. Nor do the recipients have the money to hire lobbyists in Washington to convince a majority of Congress to back their projects.
Murray isn't fighting the "Pork Patty" image. Instead she embraces earmarks, touting the money she brings into the state as a success. "I am proud to work hard in every community in this state to ask them what their needs are, and then go to fight within the budget process that we have to make sure the resources are here in Washington state," she said at a June press conference on the Olympia waterfront promoting a $1 million earmark she obtained to put toward a $10 million rebuild of the city's Percival Landing. The new park will include a bathhouse, pavilions, waterfront plants, and a rebuilt boardwalk extending out into Puget Sound.
