Reduction Of Doe Holdings May Ignite Hanford Land Battle

Available soon: waterfront property and stunning, cliff-top views of an unsullied stretch of the Columbia River. Agriculture or residential, or Indian reservation. Could be developed for recreation.

Or, left alone.

Get ready for one of the land fights of the century. The federal government is preparing to unload several hundred square miles of property in central Washington state, including some of the most spectacular land in the state.

On the outskirts of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, most of the land went untouched by the Cold War machine operating just a few miles away. To this day, the 51-mile stretch of the river known as the Hanford Reach remains pristine and virtually untouched by man.

What to do with it?

That is the politically charged question U.S. Senators Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Slade Gorton, R-Wash., and Rep. Richard “Doc” Hastings, R-Wash., will be grappling with this year and next as the Energy Department reduces its landholdings.

Hastings, whose district includes the nuclear reservation, already has decided the land should be returned to local control. He says county governments will do a better job of balancing “our environmental needs with our economic realities.”

Gorton also is leaning that way.

Murray’s education on the subject began Monday when environmentalists, sport fishermen and state ecology officials took her on a boat tour of the Hanford Reach. Worried that local control eventually will decimate the fall chinook salmon that spawn in the Reach, they are looking to her to sponsor legislation designating the 51-mile stretch a wild and scenic river - a classification that would prohibit the use of federal funds to do anything to degrade the waterway.

“The river is the best salesman,” said one of the trip’s organizers, Rick Leaumont, conservation committee chairman of the Lower Columbia Basin Audubon Society. “We’re hoping she’ll walk away from the river thinking, ‘My gosh this is fantastic.”’

Less friendly, and not along on the float trip, were commissioners from Washington state counties. Also absent were farmers and the handful of people who own property along the river. They oppose the designation for several reasons that boil down to one thing: As much as possible, they want the federal government gone.

“Our opposition isn’t to protecting the Reach,” said Bob Whitelatch, an orchardist and president of the Franklin County Farm Bureau. “It’s protecting the river from the federal government, as well. Every few years the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Land Management want to put up another dam or build a bridge across it. We just want it left alone and we don’t need someone 3,000 miles away to tell us what we can and cannot do with the shores of our river.”

At a time when Congress and the rest of the country are rethinking the role the federal government should play in their lives, central Washington state is trying to figure out what to do with 166,000 acres - and 102 miles of riverfront - that the federal government suddenly has no use for.

Murray has scheduled a town-hall meeting for the area on Sept. 23 to get a sense of what residents of the area want to do with the Reach and the land that now makes up the federal nuclear reservation. What she is likely to hear is that all sides say they want the same thing - protection of the Reach, the white cliffs about the river and the salmon that spawn there. All sides claim to value the river and the tourism it attracts. But they do not agree on how best to protect the river.

Environmentalists and fishermen think a recreational-use status under the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act is essential to preserving the river. That status would establish a quarter-mile-wide buffer zone on both sides of the river, and restrict development and irrigation projects that would adversely affect the river, bluffs and banks.

The farming community appears divided on what should be done. Some think the area north of the river - known as the North, or Wahluke, Slope - would be a perfect place to grow wheat or alfalfa or plant orchards. A few farmers have formed an organization - Wahluke 2000 - whose goal is to irrigate that land by the turn of the century.

Other farmers, however, worry that the additional acres would further stress an already inadequate water supply.

They also fear that Hanford’s nuclear reputation would do to those crops what Alar, a growth-retarding hormone that is now banned, and actress Meryl Streep, who spoke out against its use, did to Washington state apples - damage an entire crop’s reputation, making it more difficult to export.