Locke Tours Hanford Reach Governor Mum On Stance He’ll Take During Coming Debate Over Control Of Area
Cruising through wild and wide-open country Tuesday, Gov. Gary Locke said he will keep an open mind on the fate of the Hanford Reach - the last free-flowing stretch of this river.
The first-term Democrat, a favorite in the Clinton White House, is being wooed by all sides in the coming congressional fight over control of the 51-mile reach and adjacent land.
“I’m here to learn” before taking a position on the issue, Locke said during a daylong boat tour of the pristine area. He was accompanied by federal and local government officials and representatives of environmental groups.
The reach and adjacent shorelines have been off limits to the public since World War II, when the land was appropriated to ensure security at the 560-acre Hanford nuclear reservation. The federal site produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal for four decades, until the late 1980s.
When the Cold War ended, Hanford’s plutonium mission ended as well, and the U.S. Department of Energy now wants to relinquish control of the reach.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who will be seeking a second term in November, has introduced legislation that would protect the stretch from development under the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
Rep. Doc Hastings. R-Wash., whose district includes the reach, has introduced a countermeasure calling for shared county, state and federal control of the reach, with counties having the most power.
“There’s no one who wants to see development on the reach,” said Grant County Commissioner Helen Fancher.
But officials in neighboring counties, who helped draft Hastings’ bill, want to leave open the possibility of agriculture and some other business development. They say that is needed to create a tax base to pay for environmental protection programs.
Environmentalists and other backers of Murray’s bill fear local control will translate into more irrigation - a prime use of the Columbia in parched Central Washington - which could threaten an important chinook salmon-spawning area and other wildlife habitat in the reach.
Locke, who steadfastly refused to share any opinions he might have formed during the tour, was especially curious about the impact of existing irrigation on the reach’s White Bluffs area. Irrigation runoff is blamed for erosion of the bluff which, if continued, could damage or destroy spawning habitat.
Runoff is “undeniably” part of the cause of the erosion, conceded Shannon McDaniel, manager of the South Columbia Basin Irrigation District that provides river water to 230,000 acres in the Mattawa area.
The land around the reach is an arid semidesert landscape that has changed little in the nearly 45 years since the federal government - under the atomic-bomb building Manhattan Project - took control.
The years since have left the reach virtually untouched. There are no dams, and few roads, buildings, irrigation canals or other development.