Republican Bill Flores’ congressional campaign fired a legal threat at incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards about an Edwards television advertisement Wednesday.

The Flores campaign also aired its own television ad highlighting increasing unemployment despite the passage of economic stimulus measures supported by Edwards.

Earlier, Edwards’ campaign demanded that Flores make public his 1998-99 tax return to show whether he benefited from a merger of two oil field service firms, Baker Hughes and Western Atlas.

U.S. House candidate Bill Flores (left) has released a TV ad criticizing Chet Edwards (right) for rising unemployment rates in the district, even following passage of the stimulus package, which Edwards supported.

Flores was then chief financial officer and senior vice president of Western Atlas.

Flores, of Bryan, and Edwards, of Waco, are locked in a heated battle for the 17th Congressional District seat.

Edwards has asserted that Flores was involved in making the deal that merged Western Atlas and Baker Hughes, which led to more than 3,000 workers losing their jobs.

Securities and Exchange Commission documents related to the merger discuss payments made to unnamed executives of Baker Hughes and Western Atlas, an Edwards news release said. The release questioned whether Flores was one of the executives.

The Flores campaign has said the Edwards ad is untrue. Flores demanded the ad be taken off the air, and the campaign sent a lawyer’s letter about the matter to Edwards.

The letter gave the Edwards camp until 5 p.m. today to comply, but the Edwards campaign was standing by its statements about Flores, Edwards spokeswoman Megan Jacobs said. Flores has no grounds for legal action, she said.

A statement issued Wednesday by the Edwards campaign said, “Mr. Flores should stop the smoke screens and frivolous lawsuit threats and just give voters the information they deserve — his 1998 and 1999 tax returns that will show whether he personally benefited while 3,000 employees in a merged company he helped create and run were being laid off.”

Flores spokesman Matt Mackowiak said Wednesdaynight he could not discuss what will happen next.

The letter from Flores’ attorney, Chris Gober, stated that Baker Hughes laid the workers off in 1998, but that Flores was with Western Atlas and had no power to make management decisions for either company.

The Edwards campaign either ignored important facts related to the matter or intentionally put out misinterpretations of documents in the Baker Hughes layoffs, according to the letter.

Securities and Exchange documents also show there were 170 positions eliminated by redundancies when the companies merged.

Then, 3,400 additonal workers were laid off because of business conditions, not the merger, Mackowiak said.

The new Flores television ad stated that the $800 billion stimulus package approved last year didn’t keep unemployment from increasing in many areas of Texas, including McLennan County, where unemployment peaked at 7.5 percent.

Ad attacks stimulus

“So, how did that work out?” Flores asks rhetorically in the ad, which began airing Wednesday.

“Brazos County? Unemployment got worse. McLennan County? Worse. In fact, unemployment got worse in every county in our district,” says the voice-over as county-line markers with the unemployment rates flash on the screen.

“I’m Bill Flores, and I approve this message because I think Chet Edwards and President Obama are wrong,” Flores said at the close of the ad.

The Edwards campaign said Flores’ approach would have proved costly to the Central Texas economy.

“What Bill Flores fails to mention in the ad is his jobs-killing agenda,” Jacobs said in an e-mail.

“Flores would have cost us 1,600 jobs here in Waco by sitting on the sidelines and letting the Big 12 fall apart and would cost us 5,000 good construction jobs with his opposition to nuclear loan guarantees, a position that would kill the expansion of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant in Glen Rose.”

bteeter@wacotrib.com

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