Aggressive Promotional Blitz Aims To Shake SSC's Pork Barrel Image

As enthusiastic support for the superconducting supercollider cools off, advocates step up efforts to save the megaproject Proponents of the superconducting supercollider are mounting a vigorous public relations campaign to win over Congress and the United States public and to head off a repeat of last summer's House vote to kill the $8.3 billion project. Funding for the Dallas-based SSC was restored last year only through the 11th-hour mobilization of dozens of physicists to converge on Congress (Scott Veggeberg, The Scientist, Sept. 28, 1992, page 1). This year, supercollider supporters from both industry and academia are getting their campaign rolling early. And the efforts are beginning to pay off, says Jerry Staub, executive director of the National Association for the Superconducting Super Collider, an SSC-promoting industry association. This organization--with financial support from SSC contractors like St. Louis-based General Dynamics Corp. and Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Corp.--has "hit the floor running" with the establishment in January of an office on Capitol Hill, Staub says. "I'm feeling better and better about it all the time," he says. "We're going to win." Staub maintains: "What we're doing, I think, is the way to go. It's going around the Hill to see every member of Congress one on one." This personal approach is important, he says, because the SSC's mission and goals are difficult to sell in a broad sense and it's also a project that is "easy to throw grenades at." One grenade proponents have had to spend a lot of effort defusing was a negative report, entitled "Super Collider Is Over Budget and Behind Schedule," issued in February by the General Accounting Office. Staub says the derogatory tone of the report is not surprising, given that it was commissioned by two SSC opponents, Reps. Howard Wolpe (D-Mich.) and Sherwood Boehlert (R- N.Y.). For the report, the GAO based its trend analysis projections on the construction of a single building and extrapolated cost overruns for the SSC at $630 million. But incoming Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary defended the project in a February 24 letter to Congress. "The Superconducting Super Collider project is being managed in a very conservative manner," she wrote. And she refuted the GAO trend analysis by pointing out that the project is 16 percent complete and has used only 3.5 percent of the contingency money allocated for items that exceed the baseline budget. "Contrary to the conclusion drawn by the General Accounting Office, aside from the effects of substantial underfunding in the last several years, the project is meeting its budget and schedule goals and the cost estimate prepared several years ago is still accurate," O'Leary's letter said. Staub says that Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) has ordered a new report on SSC costs and schedule, but the damage has been done by fueling media attacks on the project. There has been considerable negative press this year, says Staub, including a scathing four- minute segment on the television show "Prime Time Live," and a particularly critical series of articles in Newsweek, which called it a "quark barrel." To help shake the SSC's porcine image, the association conducted a pro-SSC news conference on April 13 that featured seven Nobelists, including former Fermilab head Leon Lederman. The group also met that same day with Vice President Al Gore to receive his public endorsement of the project. In addition, the supercollider association has hired a Washington public relations firm, Young and Associates, which has been handling press contacts and has been putting on events such as an April 26 news conference with Rep. Martin Frost (D-Texas), whose district includes the SSC, along with Will Happer, the Department of Energy's director of energy research. Staub says that, thanks to these efforts, the SSC has been taken off "the pork list" at most publications. On the academic side, Michael Barnett, a theoretical physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, is once again coordinating what he calls an SSC "information campaign" targeted at members of Congress. A similar effort last year was acknowledged by opponents as playing a powerful role in ultimately restoring SSC funding. Last month, Barnett coordinated an excursion by a group of about 60 physicists and students who paid their own expenses to visit congressional staffers and tout the supercollider. During the course of this trip, Barnett says, he found that the new members of Congress, more than 100 in number, are completely unfamiliar with what the SSC's purpose is, and most claim they're open-minded. Still, the word in Congress is that the new members will vote 2-to-1 against the SSC, he says. Barnett also found the GAO report--despite rebuttals from DOE and despite Dingell's call for a new study--was an issue during these visits. In his own conversations with 25 congressional staffers, Barnett says, he found that "not one had an inkling" the report was anything but a completely correct reflection of the situation at the SSC. Barnett believes the supercollider faces a tough battle in Congress this year. "If the vote were taken today, I'm told we would lose," he says, and so he will keep the pressure up. At press time, Barnett was organizing another group of about 60 physicists to lobby Congress. Even SSC director Roy Schwitters has been drafted into the P.R. effort. He says he appeared on April 29 at State University of New York, Stony Brook, for a forum to "educate the local people to what the SSC is about." The forum itself, including Schwitters's travel expenses, was paid for by the Texas National Research Laboratory Commission, created by Texas to protect and oversee its $1 billion SSC commitment. Sponsorship of future forums is under discussion, say commission officials. Schwitters, as the one responsible for the alleged cost and schedule overruns, has also found the GAO report troublesome. "It puts me in a position instantly of having to say, `I am not a crook,' " he says. As for the upcoming battle over continued SSC funding, Schwitters says, "It's going to be tough." The mood in Congress is "very critical of funding any new project," he says. The DOE budget that the House is expected to vote on in late June contains only $640 million for the collider, reflecting the Clinton administration's desire to stretch SSC construction out over an extra three years, with completion by 2002 instead of 1999. The Bush administration was recommending $850 million for fiscal year 1994, to make up for last year's shortfall and keep the project on the original schedule. Barnett says that because support in the Senate appears strong, the House vote will be extremely important. "If we win in the House, we've won," he predicts. "If it loses in the House by a lot, it's all over." (The Scientist, Vol:7, #11, May 31, 1993) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)

Aggressive Promotional Blitz Aims To Shake SSC's Pork Barrel Image

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