Oregon Senators Say Clinton ‘Coming Around’ They Expect President To Eventually Sign Legislation Insulating Salvage Logging

Oregon Sens. Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood said Tuesday they expect President Clinton eventually will sign legislation insulating salvage logging on national forests from legal challenges.

“My personal opinion is they will buy off on what they can get from the Congress,” Hatfield told a group of loggers, miners and ranchers.

Packwood also told the group he expects Clinton will accept the so-called “sufficiency language” that would protect the logging plans from environmentalists’ lawsuits.

“The president is finally coming around - I thought that he would have sooner - but he sooner or later will come to sufficiency language,” Packwood said.

“You can’t get any timber unless you say ‘We’re passing this and you can’t sue,”’ he said.

The White House had no immediate comment Tuesday.

The two Republican senators spoke to activists lobbying Congress this week from the Oregon Lands Coalition and others affiliated with the Alliance for America, a coalition of workers from natural resources industries.

Hatfield, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said negotiations were resuming between Congress and the administration to revive a comprehensive spending cuts bill that Clinton earlier vetoed.

The $16.4 billion rescission bill included an amendment that would have exempted some logging from environmental laws in an effort to reduce fire threats and carry out Clinton’s Northwest forest plan.

The administration offered a counter proposal Tuesday that would bring the spending cuts down to $15 billion, restoring some spending for education and social programs, Hatfield said.

The counter offer also included substitute language to expedite salvage logging without insulating the logging from lawsuits, he said.

Hatfield said he expects Clinton ultimately will sign a bill with spending cuts in the neighborhood of $15.8 billion “and the existing timber language.” He said the logging exemptions earlier approved by Congress are not negotiable.

President Clinton singled out the logging when he vetoed the bill earlier this month, saying it included a “very bad environmental provision” that could have damaged national forests by exempting some logging from laws protecting fish and wildlife.

“Nobody’s worked any harder than I have to start logging again in our country’s forests in an appropriate way. Suspending all of the environmental laws of the country for three years is not the appropriate way,” Clinton said.

The veto won him praise from conservationists, many of whom have criticized Clinton since his election for failing to take a tougher stand.

Packwood said Clinton “practically made that a cause celebre in his veto. …

“We’re going to send it back to him,” the senator said.

Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., author of a House version of the logging provision, said on Monday, “I guarantee you the timber salvage bill will be intact in the new rescission bill.”

Both Taylor, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, and Hatfield said if a new rescission bill is not sent to Clinton then the logging measures will be included as part of Congress’ appropriation for the Forest Service’s 1996 budget.

Hatfield said he wasn’t taking Clinton’s latest counter-offer too seriously because it included a demand that Congress end a tax break for billionaires living overseas.