In Bill Clinton's Arkansas, Name Of The Game Is Chicken

SPRINGDALE, Ark. - Don Tyson kills 25 million chickens a week on his assembly lines, 10 times as many birds as there are people in Arkansas. The annual revenue of his firm, Tyson Foods, the largest in the state's dominant industry, is twice the size of the Arkansas budget.

Those figures alone help explain a key equation in the state that Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton has governed for 11 years: Chickens equal political power.

Nowhere is that connection more evident than here in the rolling hills of northwest Arkansas, where Tyson is president of a $4 billion family business that is the world's leading chicken processing company. It is somehow fitting that Tyson, who wears a khaki uniform on the job, works in a suite resembling the one Clinton yearns to occupy - a replica of the Oval Office with a desk modeled after Thomas Jefferson's.

The boom years for Tyson the chicken magnate parallel Clinton's time as a governor consumed with the cause of economic growth for his rural, impoverished state. How Clinton has dealt with Tyson and the powerful poultry industry during those years reveals much about the style and the substance of his five terms as governor.

It would be an overstatement to say that Clinton and Tyson could not have succeeded without each other - for the most part their relationship has been of mutual benefit, helping Tyson expand his operations and Clinton ascend politically.

But critics of Clinton say the relationship has had serious costs for the state he governs, both to its environment and to the middle-class taxpayers who live with an inequitable system that gives breaks to industry while imposing sales taxes on such necessities as food.

And in a campaign where Clinton calls himself "an agent for change," his relationship with Tyson and the poultry industry reveals a more traditional figure, a governor comfortable with the cozy, one-of-the-boys interplay between big business and government, more interested in accommodation than confrontation, sometimes hesitant to challenge the state's entrenched economic interests.

In his desire to improve the economic climate, Clinton during the past decade has used tax breaks, development grants and at times lenient environmental regulations to turn the state into a comfort zone for industry, including some heavy polluters. Tyson alone received $7.8 million in tax breaks for expanding existing plants and work force from 1988 to 1990, according to state records.

When Tyson was deciding whether to build a new $40 million processing plant in Pine Bluff, the Clinton administration gave the city a $900,000 grant to build new roads and improve the infrastructure at the proposed site and granted Tyson tax credits for bringing new jobs to the area.

Wally Gieringer, director of the Pine Bluff industrial foundation, said the governor's role was crucial.

But John Tyson, Don Tyson's son and the poultry company's vice president, says the tax breaks and infrastructure grant had nothing to do with the company's decision to locate in Pine Bluff.

Clinton says he was obsessed during that period with creating jobs. "The unemployment rate was high (about 9 percent)," he said. "I was concerned with putting people back to work."

His approach helped lower the jobless rate and paid important political dividends for him as well. Tyson Foods has provided free plane rides for the governor and his wife, and its executives have helped him with thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and industry fund-raising efforts.

FOWL PLAY

The easy play between poultry leaders and the governor does not sit as well, however, with the families who feel they have been victimized by the pollution caused by chicken waste. Nearly half of the 600 miles of streams in the part of Arkansas where the poultry industry is centered are considered so polluted by chicken and livestock waste that they are off-limits to swimming.

Virtually every tributary of the White River, a world-class trout stream in the heart of the Ozarks vacationland, is contaminated by fecal coliform, and many by nitrates, threatening the drinking water supply for 300,000 people, according to officials at the state's Pollution Control and Ecology Department.

In five northwestern counties, chickens produce 500,000 tons of waste, known as litter, each year - equivalent to the output of 4 million people.

Brownie Ledbetter, director of the Arkansas Public Policy Project, says the governor's attitude toward poultry companies and other big industries seems rooted in the cozy traditions of old-style Southern politics.

"The corporate folks have dominated this state economically and politically since it was a territory," Ledbetter said. "That is not Bill's fault. What bothers me is he has amassed so much political capital over the years that he could use to change things, but he hasn't used it. He's just following the great Southern economic development plan - come to us, we have cheap wages, few unions, all the tax breaks you could want and lousy environmental regulations."

In response to such charges, Clinton says he has tried to balance the state's economic needs with environmental safeguards. He notesthat in the same year he pushed a series of manufacturing tax credits through the Legislature, he also signed into law measures allowing the state to impose fines on polluters without going through the courts.

CHICKENS, NOT HOGS

While "Razorbacks" is the nickname for the University of Arkansas' sports teams, chickens, not hogs, are the dominant animal in this state. The poultry industry accounts for more than half of Arkansas' agricultural value, one of every 12 private jobs, 18 percent of the grower chicks nationwide and more than half of the fast-food chicken products in the world.

Tyson Foods alone uses as much water each day as the city of Atlanta. The industry as a whole is the state's leading user of utilities, trucks and paper products.

The chicken connection is symbolized by the fact that a state legislator, Sen. Joe Yates, a Republican, is on the payroll of the poultry federation as director of industrial relations.

Clinton and his wife, Hillary, have been treated to free air transportation by Tyson on nine occasions since 1989 - eight recorded as business trips and one as personal.

There are no state laws proscribing Clinton's acceptance of such corporate largess, and Clinton says he has no qualms about the situation, which one of his aides describes as "corporate hitchhiking." As long as the trips are reported, Clinton says, "I do not think it is inappropriate."

James Blair, the Tyson Foods general counsel listed as the host for two of Clinton's trips, is Tyson's key connection to the governor. He and his wife, University of Arkansas political science professor Diane Blair, a Clinton campaign adviser, are longtime friends of the Clintons. In 1985, Clinton appointed Blair to the University of Arkansas board of directors, a state panel that he now chairs while also working for Tyson.

Asked whether he sees any appearance of conflict of interest in his relationship with Blair and Blair's dealings with the state, Clinton offers a one-word answer: "No."

POLLUTION PROBLEMS

The growth of the Arkansas poultry business has created problems potentially as large as its profits. Oceans of contaminated water used in plants where the birds are killed, plucked and packaged, for example, are chemically treated to varying degrees of cleanliness and then discharged directly into streams or municipal treatment plants.

But a greater environmental threat is caused by the way chicken farmers empty their cages and dump dry litter on cropland. Some farms in the state have become so saturated that new loadings of litter lie on the surface and quickly wash into streams. As a result, the streams are often teeming with fecal bacteria.

More ominous is the presence in the water of high levels of nitrates known to cause blue-baby syndrome. Nitrates also spawn algae, which reacts with chlorine in treated drinking water and can create cancer-causing byproducts.

The problem of poultry waste has exploded in recent years - and tested Clinton's political will.

Even his critics concede that he has taken on the chicken barons more forcefully than any previous Arkansas governor. State regulators have written discharge permits for major chicken processors and forced the modernization of municipal treatment facilities to handle the heavy flow of plant wastes.

As the state stepped up enforcement of pollution limits, Tyson Foods spent about $50 million on pollution controls for its plants in the state. In 1990, Clinton convened a task force to recommend ways of protecting streams and ground water from poultry litter.

But the critics say the reality of Clinton's program does not live up to his rhetoric. His administration spent relatively little to upgrade municipal plants and failed to enforce permit requirements of serious polluters.

The task force, heavily weighted with industry members and supporters - and, in fact, reconstituted by Clinton from an in-house industry panel - has spent two years studying the problem of chicken litter without recommending a single remedy.

ARTFUL SYMBIOSIS

In Don Tyson's oak-paneled suite, the symbiosis of politics and business is elevated to an art form. Appointing the stately replica of the Oval Office is poultry paraphernalia - shiny brass doorknobs shaped like eggs, bronzed egg cartons in sculpture, a chicken head carved in the fireplace.

"I think Bill will make us a darn good president or I wouldn't support him," says the bantam-sized chicken tycoon. With the understated style that allows him to attribute his multibillion-dollar empire to luck, Tyson adds about his relationship with Clinton: "Sometimes if I call him, he'll answer the call."