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Lieberman attacks Leavitt-Norton deal

By Christopher Smith
The Salt Lake Tribune

WASHINGTON -- A top Senate Democrat expected to be a leading voice against Gov. Mike Leavitt's nomination to head the Environmental Protection Agency has written a pointed letter about Leavitt's April deal to eliminate nearly 6 million Utah acres from study as potential wilderness.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut said contrary to statements made by Interior Secretary Gale Norton when she announced the settlement agreement with Leavitt, the Bureau of Land Management has not developed any plan to preserve areas with wilderness characteristics that lost their protection status in the deal.
"DOI [Department of the Interior] and BLM officials have made statements suggesting that although such areas could not be designated as wilderness study areas, they could and would be protected," wrote Lieberman, the ranking member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which investigates the operations and management of all branches of the federal bureaucracy. "However, to date there has been no visible evidence of efforts by the administration to ensure protection of these valuable areas, suggesting that these statements were little more than illusory promises."
Lieberman's interest in the Utah deal -- his seven-page Aug. 15 letter to Norton includes more than two dozen questions and requests for documentation, instructions and directives related to the settlement -- is another indication of the contentious reception Utah's Republican governor can expect from the nine minority members on the Senate Environment Committee, which includes Lieberman.
That panel, headed by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., will hold confirmation hearings shortly on Leavitt's nomination to head the EPA, an agency that along with the Interior Department has become a target for Democrats seeking to blast President Bush's stated commitment to protecting land, air and water from environmental degradation.
Lieberman earlier this week joined another Environment Committee member, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., in condemning the White House for requiring the EPA to sugarcoat the true respiratory health risk to those in the World Trade Center disaster zone following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Lieberman and Sen. Jim Jeffords, the Vermont Independent who is the ranking minority member of the Environment Committee, also this past week released a General Accounting Office report that found EPA had no scientific data for a rule change that was finalized Wednesday relaxing the anti-air pollution controls on aging powerplants and factories.
Saying it would be premature since he has not been formally nominated or confirmed, Leavitt declined requests from environmental organizations to ask the administration to delay the rule change until he could study its impact.
"They don't like to get the facts in the way of their frenzy to roll back important environmental and public health protections," Jeffords said in a statement.
Senate Democrats, led by New Mexico's Jeff Bingaman, already have asked for an inspector general's probe of the legality of a separate agreement between Leavitt and Norton to allow the BLM to "disclaim" disputed federal road rights-of-way in Utah counties. That deal on dirt roads was so broad that even the Republican-dominated House was prompted to cut it back from its original scope when House members recently approved their version of the Interior Department's spending level for next year.
Now Lieberman wants answers about the Leavitt-Norton settlement that ended a 1996 lawsuit brought by the state, the Utah Association of Counties and state school trust lands administration.
The state's suit had contested BLM's authority for a new inventory of Utah public lands that were deemed possible wilderness in 1991. The Clinton administration's inventory added 2.6 million acres to the original 3.2 million first identified as meeting the Wilderness Act's roadless criteria and, therefore, off-limits to mining, road-building and other development. The April 11 settlement removed those 5.8 million acres from interim protection, with Norton contending that Congress -- not the nation's federal land managers -- should decide which scenic landscapes deserve wilderness protection.
The settlement also effectively capped any further additions to the pool of federal lands across the nation that BLM says have potential wilderness characteristics, prompting 10 environmental groups to appeal the legal pact to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. A coalition of outdoor-equipment makers also threatened to pull its retailers convention from Salt Lake City to protest the deal. Leavitt placated that threat by promising to work on congressionally designated status for some of the lands.
At the time, Norton announced the Interior Department "plans to consider wilderness inventories and recommendations from wilderness advocates in its planning process and fully anticipates that many areas will be managed in their natural state to preserve wilderness characteristics."
However, Lieberman claims BLM field staff still have received no direction "regarding the priority for and the manner of protecting these lands."
He said the inaction contrasts with the rapid manner Interior bosses issued detailed instructions on how to incorporate a new energy resources inventory into land use plans for increased permitting of oil and gas wells on federal lands in Utah's Uinta Basin and four other western states.
Lieberman's letter includes questions about how quickly BLM will determine what newly released lands have areas of "critical environmental concern" worthy of protection, how many resource plans are being revised to address which de-listed lands have primitive qualities and which areas no longer protected as wilderness currently have pending requests before BLM for permission to develop them in ways "that may degrade or compromise their wilderness character."
"We have received Sen. Lieberman's letter and we are working on a response to his questions," Interior Department spokesman John Wright said Friday. "We'll get back to him as soon as we possibly can."

"A top Senate Democrat expected to be a leading voice against Gov. Mike Leavitt's nomination to head the Environmental Protection Agency has written a pointed letter about Leavitt's April deal to eliminate nearly 6 million Utah acres from study as potential wilderness."

Would the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument be part of that acreage in Utah?

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
http://chriscannon.house.gov/cannon/grand_staircase-escalante.html
On September 18, 1996, in the midst of the presidential campaign, President Clinton traveled to Arizona and designated the 1.7 million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Southern Utah. The Monument is approximately the size of Connecticut. Utahns were outraged because the plan was not disclosed to Utahns or their elected leaders. Also, 175,000 acres of
Utah school trust lands were trapped inside the Monument. Ironically, Utahns would have supported some sort of protective designation in portions of the area. But, the lack of consultation led to a designation fraught with problems that the local residents, the State of Utah and the federal government will be forced to grapple with over the next decade or more.

REMARKS BY REP. CHRIS CANNON ON THE HOUSE FLOOR
"One Year Anniversary: Utah's Schools Shouldn't Continue to Pay for the
Creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument"

http://chriscannon.house.gov/cannon/utah_schools_shouldn.html
September 18, 1997

Mr. Speaker, today is the one year anniversary of President Clinton's declaration of the massive Utah Monument in my district.

Within the Monument are 175,000 acres of school trust lands. They contain vast deposits of coal, large quantities of oil, gas and hard rock minerals. The total value is in the billions of dollars.

A year ago, the President stood in Arizona and promised that "creating this national monument should not and will not come at the expense of Utah's children" and vowed to create a working group, including Utah's congressional delegation, to find equivalent lands for exchange.

A year later, no working group exists. No member of the Utah delegation has been contacted. And the Utah School Trust has been unable to open negotiations.

Mr. President, I ask for your help. With 48 of my colleagues, I am sending you today a letter asking for creation of the promised working group. The burden of your decision to create the Monument should not - it must not - fall on Utah's school children.

Thank you Mr. Speaker.