Howard Dean had own secret energy group in Vermont

WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean has demanded release of secret deliberations of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. But as Vermont governor, Dean had an energy task force that met in secret and angered state lawmakers.

Dean's group held one public hearing and after-the-fact volunteered the names of industry executives and liberal advocates it consulted in private, but the Vermont governor refused to open the task force's closed-door deliberations.

In 1999, Dean offered the same argument the Bush administration uses today for keeping deliberations of a policy task force secret.

"The governor needs to receive advice from time to time in closed session. As every person in government knows, sometimes you get more open discussion when it's not public," Dean was quoted as saying.

Dean's own dispute over the secrecy of a Vermont task force that devised a policy for restructuring the state's near-bankrupt electric utilities has escaped national attention, even though he has attacked a similar arrangement used by President Bush.

Dean defended his recent criticism of Cheney's task force and his demand that the administration release its private energy deliberations even though he refused to do that in Vermont.

Dean said his group developed better policy, was bipartisan and sought advice not just from energy executives but environmentalists and low-income advocates. He said his task force was more open because it held one public hearing and divulged afterward the names of people it consulted even though the content of discussions with them was kept secret.

The Vermont task force "is not exactly the Cheney thing," Dean said. "We had a much more open process than Cheney's process. We named the people we sought advice from in our final report."

Need for privacy

Dean said he still believes it was necessary to keep task force deliberations secret, especially because the group was reviewing proprietary financial data from Vermont utilities.

"Some advice does have to be given in private, but I don't mind letting people know who gave that advice," he said.

An expert in political rhetoric said it was risky for Dean to attack Bush and Cheney on an issue where he was vulnerable.

"In general, what is good for the vice president should be good for the governor. A candidate who attacks on grounds he is vulnerable is foolish," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania professor who helps run a Web site that compares presidential candidates' rhetoric to the facts.

"Governor Dean confronted and averted an energy crisis that would have had disastrous consequences for the citizens of Vermont by bringing together a bipartisan and ideologically diverse working group that solved the problem. Dick Cheney put together a group of his corporate cronies and partisan political contributors, and they gave themselves billions and disguised it as a national energy policy," spokesman Jay Carson said.

In September, Dean argued that the task force Cheney assembled in 2001 and the Bush energy policy were unduly influenced by Bush family friend and Enron energy chief Kenneth Lay.

"The administration should also level with the American people about just how much influence Ken Lay and his industry buddies had over the development of the president's energy policy by releasing notes on the deliberations of Vice President Cheney's energy task force," Dean said Sept. 15.

In 1998, Dean's Vermont task force met in secret to write a plan for revamping state electricity markets that would slow rising consumer costs and relieve utilities of a money-losing deal with a Canadian company.

The task force's work resulted in Vermont having the first utility in the country to meet energy efficiency standards. It also freed the state's utilities from their deal with a Canadian power company, Hydro Quebec, that had left them near bankruptcy but passed as much as 90 percent of those costs to consumers. Utility shareholders also suffered some losses.

The parallels between the Cheney and Dean task forces are many.

Both declined to open their deliberations, even under pressure from legislators. Both received input from the energy industry in private meetings, and released the names of task force members publicly.

Dean's group volunteered the names of those it consulted with in its final report. While Cheney has refused to formally give a list to Congress to preserve the White House's right to private advice, known as executive privilege, his aides have divulged to reporters the names of many of those from whom the task force sought advice.

The Bush-Cheney campaign and Republican Party received millions in donations from energy interests in the election before its task force was created. Dean's Vermont re-election campaign received only small contributions from energy executives, but a political action committee created as he prepared to run for president collected $19,000, or nearly a fifth of its first $110,000, from donors tied to Vermont's electric utilities.

One co-chairman of Dean's task force, William Gilbert, was a Republican Vermont lawyer who had done work for state utilities. At the time, Gilbert also served on the board of Vermont Gas Systems, a subsidiary of the Canadian power giant Hydro Quebec.

Many state legislators, including Dean's fellow Democrats, were angered that the task force met secretly.

"It taints the whole report," Democratic state Rep. Al Stevens told AP in 1999. "I'd have more faith in that report if the discussions had been open."

Elizabeth Bankowski, who served as the other co-chair of the task force, told the legislature that the requirement the task force meet in secret "was decided in advance by the governor's office and the governor's lawyer." Dean's lawyer argued the secrecy was permitted under a 1988 legal change.

Another secrecy issue has surfaced during Dean's campaign over his decision, before leaving office as governor in January, to seal for 10 years about 145 boxes of his official papers.

Two of Dean's predecessors used executive privilege to seal roughly the same percentage of their documents, but not for so long. A conservative Washington legal group has sued to try to unseal the records.