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GREEN
National parks for sale — or not?
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Rarely do 280-page budget-appropriations-bill drafts get called "absurd and laughable," "not serious in any way," "outrageous and absurd," and a "joke" — especially by the staff of the congressional-committee chairman who wrote it. But those are recent quotes being bandied about as Representative Richard Pombo (R-California) tries desperately to backpedal from his own plan to sell off the country’s public land and parks.

The leaked "Proposed Recommendations for Budget Reconciliation" for the Department of the Interior — an annual fall process for all departments — includes a variety of startling new proposals, including the following doozies:

• Selling 16 national parks, including the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Massachusetts, to energy and real-estate speculators. Along with other parcels pegged for sale, the plan would include nearly a quarter of the country’s total park-system acreage, according to the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA).

• Mandating the sale of sponsorships and naming rights for park buses, trails, information centers, and other structures, raising $20 million.

• Allowing private mining companies to patent public land, an obscure practice created by the 1872 Mining Law that has been banned for 10 years. Under Pombo’s plan, companies could buy any public land they want for $1000 an acre, explains Lauren Pagel, legislative coordinator for EarthWorks, an environmental lobby.

The document was sent from the House Resource Committee, which Pombo chairs, to the Congressional Budget Office last month, and from there was leaked to NPCA. Shock and outrage soon followed from environmental groups.

But the document wasn’t a real proposal, says Brian Kennedy, spokesperson for the House Resource Committee, of which Pombo is chair. "None of these things are on the table. At no time were they on the table," Kennedy says. It was more like an intellectual exercise, to see how the Department of the Interior could save or raise an extra $2.4 billion — the amount the committee has been charged with saving.

Not everyone buys it. "You do not draft legislation and send it to the Congressional Budget Office on a whim," says Craig Obey, NPCA spokesperson. "I just don’t believe it."

But there is a subtext to this tempest, and it lies in the far-from-random $2.4 billion figure. That happens to be the exact amount that would be raised by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

So, one approach — the one Pombo supports — would be to simply include ANWR in the budget-reconciliation bill. The leaked draft demonstrates the alternative — purporting to show the extraordinary lengths and pains necessary to raise $2.4 billion without ANWR.

"He’s setting up a false choice," says Obey. "The idea that you have to sell off national parks or do ANWR is ludicrous."

Obey and others are urging people to loudly protest the proposals in the leaked document, despite Pombo’s backtracking. "If people don’t react strongly to it, it becomes more serious next time."

But perhaps the more important public input will come when Pombo’s committee sends its real bill to the Budget Committee later this month — that is, for those concerned about Arctic drilling. Says Kennedy, "ANWR will be in the Resource Committee’s reconciliation package."


Issue Date: October 7 - 13, 2005
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