THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 1, 1995 TAG: 9507010469
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Sen. Jesse Helms was mad as a wet firecracker this week.
The North Carolina Republican angrily introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate that would take away Interior Department control of the Oregon Inlet shoreline so the Army Corps of Engineers can build mile-long jetties designed to stabilize an all-weather channel to the Atlantic.
``Ever since 1970, the project has been repeatedly and deliberately delayed by bureaucratic roadblocks contrived by the fringe elements of the environmental movement,'' Helms told the Senate.
In a bill titled ``The Oregon Inlet Protection Act,'' Helms called upon the secretary of the Interior to transfer ``administrative jurisdiction'' over the Oregon Inlet shorelines to the Army. Helms' bill called for the transfer to take place within 60 days of enactment of the measure.
The Corps of Engineers is responsible for the dredging and safety of Oregon Inlet but the Interior Department owns the sandy land on the north and south sides of the waterway where the Army wants to anchor the breakwaters.
Congress in 1970 authorized the engineers to build a 400-foot wide, 20-foot deep channel through the Outer Banks inlet. The engineers said their stone jetties would reach deep water beyond the treacherous Oregon Inlet entrance bar.
Helms told the Senate that 20 fishermen have been drowned in the inlet since the jetties were approved. The hulks of foundered trawlers are occasionally visible when huge storm waves sweep across Oregon Inlet's unprotected entrance bar.
``In October 1992, then-Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan issued conditional permits for the Corps of Engineers to begin the construction process. However, the Clinton administration revoked these permits,'' Helms told the Senate.
``The bill I'm offering serves notice to the self-proclaimed environmentalists who have stalled this project that I will continue to do everything I can to protect the lives and livelihoods of the countless commercial and recreational fishermen who have been denied greater economic opportunities because of the obstinacy of the federal government.''
Helms said the land transfer legislation would ``spend no money, nor authorize new expenditures nor new projects.''
The transfer would involve 100 acres of Interior Department land on each side of the inlet on the Dare County Outer Banks.
As long as the Interior Department has controlled the land, it has been relatively easy for environmentalists working in Congress or in the Interior Department to block efforts to build the $100-million jetties on grounds the breakwaters would harm the ecology of the region.
``The proposed Oregon Inlet jetties surely are the most over-studied project in the history of the Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior,'' said Helms.
``Since 1969, the federal government has conducted 97 major studies and three full-blown environmental impact statements but, of course, the environmentalists demand more. As for the cost/benefit factor, the Office of Management and Budget found - as recently as March 14, 1991 - the project to be economically justified.''
Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, specifically criticized a North Carolina university professor long identified with efforts to block the jetties.
Helms referred to a Smithsonian Magazine story that quoted the professor as telling an angry Oregon Inlet fisherman that he - the professor - ``and his friends will not be satisfied until all the houses are taken off the shore to leave it (the inlet) the way it was before.''
Said Helms: ``This is not environmental activism. It is environmental hypocrisy that, as the poet said `does not even make good nonsense.'''
Helms' stand will put him in unusual company.
Both Democratic Gov. James B. Hunt Jr., and state Sen. Marc Basnight, D-Dare, the president pro-tem of the N.C. Senate, have consistently lobbied for the jetties.
For years the jetties have been a political bouquet often tossed to Albemarle constituents by ambitious Democratic candidates. Helms' position on the jetties can only help him in the northeast during his 1996 re-election campaign.
``The time for delay is over,'' Helms told the Senate, ``It is time to put these long-neglected citizens of North Carolina first. This legislation will mark the beginning of the end of the jetty debate on the Outer Banks.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
by CNB