FLACK ATTACK

Sabato is skeptical. "Their fallback is always that it could have been much worse without us," he says. "But you can never prove that."

Hill & Knowlton charged the city between $120 and $160 an hour for its vice presidents who worked on the DIA project. There were lots of incidentals as well: almost $100 for a videocassette of an ABC News report on the airport; $49 for a limousine to take Mankiewicz to Dulles Airport on October 7; more than $2,000 to retrieve copies of news articles from computer databases.

And Barbara Coons, a senior vice president and head of research at the firm, was asked to figure out what time the sun would rise on March 9 for one of the morning network news shows, which hoped to have cameras present the day of the opening. Records show Coons, who bills out her time at $150 an hour, spent thirty minutes on the project.

Last week a Westword reporter set out to obtain the same information and got it in about five minutes. A call to the National Weather Service bureau in Denver put the reporter in contact with meteorologist Carl Burroughs, who said that on March 9 the sun came up here at 6:20 a.m.

"We have the table for the whole year," Burroughs said.