Gop Contract Puts Idaho Wilderness Bill On Back Burner

The Republicans’ Contract With America seems to have made Idaho wilderness a dead issue - at least for now.

The wilderness question, the permanent status of 9 million acres of roadless land, had been a hot political issue for years.

For over a year before the 1994 election, GOP Sen. Larry Craig and freshman Rep. Michael Crapo organized numerous meetings throughout the state in search of common ground for any additional wilderness acreage.

Now it’s been shunted aside, and there’s no indication when the work will resume.

All attention is on the elements of the Contract With America that fueled last fall’s GOP rout at the polls.

“That has dominated so much of the Congress that few other issues have been able to work through,” Crapo said. He has put congressional reform atop his own agenda for now.

Even ardent environmentalist Walt Minnick, who has announced for the Democratic nomination to oppose Craig next year, says if he’s elected, wilderness will not have top priority. Like the Republicans, Minnick says there are more important questions to be decided first.

It’s not as if work on wilderness has stopped completely. John Hoehne, Crapo’s Idaho chief of staff, says the staff has held five work sessions on the suitability of specific tracts for wilderness preservation and another seven or eight town meetings.

Since then, the staff has been building a computerized base of information on the wilderness issue that can be tapped by negotiators as soon as wilderness resurfaces as a priority issue.

But with the political work on wilderness almost at a standstill, that is obviously a long way off. In addition, Crapo thinks the new

GOP majority has changed the ground rules to the point that environmentalists are less eager to push for more wilderness.

With Republicans calling the shots, any wilderness bill will have stronger language protecting water rights and private property rights, Crapo said.

Craig is chairman of a Senate subcommittee working on a bill covering Utah’s Bureau of Land Management wilderness areas. He said it could be put in final form soon, and what happens to that bill could influence when an Idaho wilderness bill is introduced.

“It has water language I would like to see in the Idaho bill,” Craig said, along with provisions on release of lands and “special use” areas not set aside for wilderness.

The fate of the Utah wilderness act will indicate where the sentiment lies on issues important to Idaho wilderness, he said.