Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 28, 1995 TAG: 9511280032
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Never mind that the project, after 13 years, only recently emerged from a maze of bureaucracies. In all that time, the senator complains, ``federal bureaucrats'' did not listen to North Carolina interests but ran roughshod over them. Although a federal court found no fault in approval of the project, the senator seeks more delay and contention - the very elements that keep bureaucrats in business and lawyers in high cotton.
Oh, well, consistency's no jewel when it comes to keeping the home folk happy, so the senator, sounding a bit like a tree-hugger, holds forth on the arcana of estuaries and the ``potential negative environmental effects'' of withdrawing water from Lake Gaston for the cities of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Franklin, and Isle of Wight County.
It sounds as though Helms' concern for the environment could be put to good use on a larger front - in Alaska. There, Republican "revolutionaries'' are insisting, the Exxon Valdez oil spill to the contrary notwithstanding, that Big Oil can buddy up with grizzly bears, caribou and other critters roaming free in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They want that wilderness explored, drilled and exploited.
Despite Bill Clinton's threat of a veto, Congress has agreed and Alaskans are licking their chops. These rugged individualists pay no state sales or income taxes. The state instead sends each man, woman and child checks from state oil royalties even as it begins to confront a $500 million budget deficit. What's needed, therefore, is a new bonanza, and the Arctic Refuge is the place to find it.
As Timothy Egan explains in The New York Times, there's only one hitch (the idea of preserving wildness for the sake of wildness having been sneered away): Congressional Republicans need a little cover before breaching the refuge. No problem, the Alaska delegation replies; we'll split with you - 50-50 - royalties on oil from the refuge, and that will give Congress $1.3 billion over seven years to help pay down the federal deficit.
Fine, says Congress as it approves the deal. But it isn't fine. The 50-50 split is a ruse concocted by a congressional delegation that knew all along that the Alaska Statehood Act requires 90 percent of royalties from any lease of federal land go to Alaska citizens. The strategy was to lie their way to a 50-50 split and sue their way to a 90-10 split, knowing the statehood act likely would prove the controlling law.
As Rep. Don Young put it so clearly in a radio broadcast to the home folks: ``My decision has been all along that, all right, we'll take the 50-50 and then we'll go after the rest of it at a later time. If necessary we'll do it through the court system.'' Sen. Ted Stevens has made similar remarks - though not, of course, to Congress.
This sort of doubletalk is symptomatic of Big Oil and its allies when it wants to invade wilderness areas. Before Congress approved construction of the Trans-Alaska pipeline that moves oil from Alaska's North Slope fields, the oil companies swore that their subsidiary, the Alyeska Pipline Service Co., would exercise eternal vigilance over a pristine wilderness area. But when Exxon ran its huge tanker around, Alyeska's ready-response apparatus was inert.
The same outfit has been citing a massive pipeline-repair job as evidence that the oil companies can be trusted to develop the Arctic refuge responsibly and safely. But now, due to massive foul-ups, it has had to consider shutting down the repair program.
Some sympathy is due the companies; their pipeline runs through unforgiving territory. But Congress, considering the record, has no reason to trust them or to yield a national wilderness treasury to their exploitation.
Perry Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk.
by CNB