Anchorage Daily News (Published July 25, 2000)

MURKOWSKI PLANS CONSERVATION BILL VOTE

By David Whitney

Faced with more Republican stonewalling Monday on his bill to reallocate federal offshore oil drilling revenues into parks and conservation, Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski announced that he will force the controversial measure to a vote today.

Murkowski, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he has the votes to pass the measure out of committee but with weak Republican support.

All nine committee Democrats are expected to vote for the measure, but more than half the panel's 11 Republicans are likely to oppose it.

The bill, called the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, would spend about $3 billion a year in federal receipts from offshore drilling on a host of programs. They include impact assistance to states, coastal protection, federal payments to counties in lieu of property taxes on federal lands, federal purchases of environmentally sensitive lands, state and urban parks and recreation, historic preservation, Native lands protection, wildlife conservation and other programs.

More than 5,000 national, regional and state organizations are supporting the measure because it will pump guaranteed sums of money into popular programs for 15 years. All states would get something, but a third of the money would go to five states: California, Texas, Louisiana, Alaska and Florida.

But the measure has been hotly criticized by Republican conservatives who dominate Murkowski's committee. They complain of limited congressional say over most of the spending and concern about the federal government taking more land out of private ownership.

After Murkowski announced 10 days ago that he was bringing up a compromise version of the legislation that he had negotiated with the Democrats, Republican opponents went to work to subvert its progress.

Using an arcane Senate rule designed to protect the rights of senators to attend important debates in the Senate floor, they have prohibited the committee from meeting for more than two hours after the Senate goes into session.

That forced Murkowski to cancel two committee work sessions, include the one scheduled for Monday afternoon.

In addition, Republican critics have been drafting more and more amendments so that even when the panel puts in a full two-hour day, it has never been able to whittle down the number of pending amendments to fewer than a dozen.

"I told members that they would have every opportunity to offer amendments," Murkowski joked Monday. "They took me up on that."

Murkowski said that he will give the committee as much time as it wants again today to offer amendments but that when the two-hour clock runs down, he will offer a motion to report the bill to the full Senate, where any unfinished amendments can be addressed.

Murkowski's decision was hailed by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., the panel's senior Democrat. He called the delay tactics unprecedented.

"You've conducted the committee in a very fair and impartial way," he told Murkowski.

Where the bill heads after today is unclear. Congress leaves Friday on a five-week break, and there will be only about four weeks of work when it returns in September before it recesses for the year. And most of September will be devoted to passing mandatory 2001 spending bills.

This late in the congressional session, especially during a polarized presidential election year, the Senate leadership usually balks at bringing up such a controversial bill.

There had been speculation that Murkowski could avoid this problem by going to work with fellow Alaskan Don Young on a compromise to be added to a last-minute spending bill. Young is chairman of the House Resources Committee, and his version of the conservation bill cleared the House by a wide margin in May.

The conservation act has the general support of the Clinton administration, and the differences between the Murkowski and Young bills are generally slight.

But Murkowski said Monday that he thinks the chances of avoiding the Senate floor are poor. That leaves Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to decide whether he wants to eat up days of debate on a bill that probably half the Senate's Republican members oppose. Lott has already indicated he is unlikely to do that.

Critics were doing nothing to ease the pressure.

Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wy., said he will be back today with an amendment to stop the federal government from using the bill to add to its holdings in states where it already owns at least 25 percent of the land.

Mike Hardiman, lobbyist for the American Land Rights Association, accused Murkowski of trying to shut down "fair consideration" of the bill by moving it to a vote today.

"This is all part of his larger capitulation to environmental groups in exchange for a fat pile of cash for Alaska," Hardiman said.

Hardiman distributed a chart, with a color picture of Porky Pig, showing that Alaska's annual receipts from the bill, about $164 million, amount to $266 per state resident, nearly three times the per-capita take of any other state.

Reporter David Whitney can be reached at dwhitney@adn.com.

Be informed! Don't allow yourself to be snowed by CARA.