THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511220020
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
Comes now Jesse Helms beseeching the federal nanny to rekindle yet again the fight over the Lake Gaston water project.
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.
Oh, well, consistency's no jewel when it comes to keeping the homefolk 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 from Lake Gaston water for Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, 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 half-billion-dollar 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 down) and that is that 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 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 that 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 to be the controlling law.
As Rep. Don Young put it so clearly in a radio broadcast to the homefolks: ``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, should not trust them or yield a national wilderness treasury to their exploitation. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB