Koch Industries, the mega-company bankrolling the group that has spent $280,000 on TV ads attacking Democratic congressional candidate Denny Heck, is the same company that bought Georgia-Pacific Corp. in 2005 and laid off 300 workers at the company’s Camas pulp and paper mill a year later.
Heck’s campaign against state Rep. Jaime Herrera, his Republican opponent, hopes to get traction with that revelation as the two candidates pull out all the stops with two weeks to go until Election Day.
Koch Industries, owned by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, is the second-largest private company in the United States, according to Forbes Magazine. It’s channeling its campaign spending through a so-called independent political organization called Americans for Prosperity.
Heck-Herrera race takes spending title
“The Koch brothers … bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of attack ads on Herrera’s behalf prior to her taking $5,000 directly from the Kochs for her campaign,” Heck campaign manager Grant Lahmann said in a statement Monday. “These are the same Koch brothers who outsourced hundreds of Clark County jobs at a Georgia-Pacific plant in Camas in 2006.”
“If Jaime Herrera wants to protect jobs here in Southwest Washington, why is she taking money directly from the people responsible for stamping out hundreds of them in her own backyard?” Lahmann asked.
The Herrera campaign released a statement saying, “If anyone has contributed to my campaign because they think I’m for outsourcing jobs, then they are sorely mistaken. I’ll go to bat for the people of Southwest Washington to keep jobs from leaving our region. My job is to serve the people of Southwest Washington, not corporate interests. “
At the time the layoffs were announced, G-P officials said the cuts were not due to the sale of the Camas mill to Koch Industries but rather the result of an internal evaluation of the company’s operations that began in mid-2005. The jobs eliminated were in the company’s paper towel and tissue products lines.
“It’s a matter of having the right equipment in the right place to serve the customer base,” Robert Burns, a G-P spokesman, told The Columbian at the time.
