THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 29, 1996 TAG: 9601290106
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
A conservation-driven stand by retiring U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, D-New Jersey, could force preservationists in Virginia to sell a tract of land they bought with the intention of protecting two years ago.
The land, a 20-acre piece of property along Virginia's Colonial Parkway, was purchased - at the request of the National Park Service - by a group hoping to keep it from housing developers.
Virginia lawmakers, trying to get a bill passed to allow the National Park Service to buy the property in James City County from conservationists, have been stymied in those efforts in consecutive terms of Congress.
This time, it's because Bradley wants to have a tract of land in New Jersey preserved, and he's using his senatorial privilege to hold up more than 50 bills approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Bradley, who hopes for passage of his plan to keep more than 17,000 acres of Sterling Forest land on the New Jersey-New York border from builders, is using the other measures, including Virginia's bill, for leverage.
``It's a little, tiny hostage in the games that some people are playing,'' said Virginia Rep. Herbert H. Bateman, R-1st.
Bateman won House approval Sept. 19 of a measure that would allow spending up to $830,000 or the current appraised value - whichever is less - to buy land for widening the narrowest right of way on the Colonial Parkway.
The parkway, a scenic, 23-mile road connecting Jamestown Island, Williamsburg and Yorktown, is visited by about 4 million people annually.
The first permanent British settlement in the New World was at Jamestown. Later, the Colonial capital was housed in Williamsburg, and Yorktown was the site of the final battle of the Revolutionary War.
``It is terribly, terribly frustrating to have a very innocent and essentially uncontroversial measure that ought to become law get bogged down in other people's issues,'' Bateman said.
As the delay drags on, the Arlington, Va.-based group that bought the land - The Conservation Fund - has hinted it won't be able to hold onto it indefinitely while waiting for Congress to act.
After the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved, in April 1995, a bill to permit the transfer, it collided with Bradley's objection to taking up bills approved by the committee on the Senate floor.
And so the bill, sponsored by U.S. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb, D-Va., has languished ever since.
Bradley's legislation, meanwhile, authorizing $17.5 million to help protect Sterling Forest, was approved by the Senate on June 30, but it has encountered an uphill battle in the House Resources Committee.
This isn't the first time Colonial Parkway bills have been stymied.
In 1994, Colonial Parkway legislation died in the Senate after having passed the House. A Southern senator was unrelenting in stalling a series of bills then - including the Virginia measure - in the hope of winning federal designation for an Indian tribe in his state, according to a Senate aide. by CNB