Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds was one of 14 firms the Utah radioactive and hazardous waste company hired to push for contracts, funding and legislation. The effort included changes needed for the company's failed attempt to bring highly concentrated radioactive waste from government cleanups in Fernald, Ohio, and Niagara Falls, N.Y., to Utah.

Based on federal lobbyist disclosure reports, Envirocare had the help of roughly four dozen lobbyists, including five former congressmen and more than a dozen professional persuaders who had previously held high-ranking government positions. Company officials emphasize that Abramoff, who was with Preston Gates from 1994 to 2000, never worked for Envirocare.

"We have absolutely no relationship with him, and we never have," said Tim Barney, Envirocare's senior vice president.

Once a super-lobbyist working for one of Washington's top firms, Abramoff has pleaded guilty to fraud and faces several other corruption investigations. The scandal surrounding him has left Washington reeling, even top firms like Preston Gates, which counted Envirocare as a client between 1998 and 2003.

It is no surprise Envirocare sought expert help in Washington to build support for its mile-square radioactive and hazardous waste business. The company has looked to the federal government - the U.S. Energy Department, the Defense Department and the Environmental Protection Agency - for most of its business since its creation in 1988.

The company was on track to see 2005 as its busiest year on record, with roughly 4 million cubic feet disposed of at its Tooele County landfill in the first six months of the year.

"It's very hard for a small Utah company to navigate the federal bureaucracy," said Barney, who calls his company the most-regulated in Utah and among the most regulated nationally. "It's a business expense, but it comes with the territory to work with these federal agencies."

Sheila Krumholz, research director for Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, the Center for Responsive Politics, noted that companies find it invaluable to have lobbyists who can gain access to the nation's decision makers.

"It opens doors that might otherwise be closed to them," she said. "It's those relationships clients are paying for."

The Center for Public Integrity, another watchdog group, ranks Envirocare's lobbyist spending at 490th nationwide, several notches below the much larger Huntsman Chemical Corp., another Utah-based company. Envirocare, a private company that does not release revenue estimates, spent about $3.8 million on its Washington lobbying between 1998 and 2004. Huntsman, which had $11.5 billion in revenues last year, spent $4 million, according to the center's tally.

Envirocare has spent more with Miller & Chevalier than any other Washington lobbying organization. Since 1999, the firm's Leonard Bickwit, onetime counsel to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has received more than $1 million from the Utah company.

Some years, Bickwit visited the House and Senate on Envirocare's behalf, pressing such causes as "legislation to encourage rapid nuclear waste disposal" or U.S. policy toward Iran, the homeland of former company owner Khosrow Semnani.

Other years, the efforts were more targeted. In 2003, Bickwit reported tracking "waste disposal in Iraq, and disposal of Fernald silo waste." That fall, Congress passed legislation reclassifying the highly contaminated waste so that it could go to Envirocare, but public uproar in Utah prompted the company to withdraw its bid for the disposal job.

Bickwit declined to comment for this article. So, too, did former Texas Rep. Jim Chapman, another Washington-based Envirocare lobbyist, and Tim Peckinpaugh, the lead D.C. lobbyist for Envirocare at Preston Gates.

The five onetime lawmakers who have worked for Envirocare include Arkansas Republican Ed Bethune, Idaho Democrat Larry LaRocco, and Texas Democrats Bill Sarpalius, Ron Coleman and Jim Chapman.

Under new management for the past year, the company has put new emphasis on Washington, according to Barney. Among those who have been hired are state GOP Chairman Joe Cannon, a former Environmental Protection Agency official, and Greg Hopkins, a former Utah Republican Party director and the onetime chief of staff for Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah.

Envirocare has reported spending $290,000 on lobbying Washington in the first half of last year.

"It was nothing more than a commitment by our new ownership that we needed to strengthen our ability to work with these government agencies," said Barney.

fahys@sltrib.com