Election Will Reveal Region’s Future Aides Say Expect Same From Clinton; Dole To Rely On Gop

Northwest voters looking for some clues as to how the next administration will handle issues close to home may not find many answers until after Tuesday’s election.

In a campaign that has centered around personal character and national finances, such regional issues as national forests, endangered salmon and nuclear waste have been largely ignored by Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.

“We don’t have position papers on those issues,” said Kraig Naasz, director of the Dole/ Kemp campaign for Washington state. “We’re focusing on the broad-based policy issues facing the country.”

Vice President Al Gore said not a word about such topics last week during his stop in Spokane. The president’s re-election campaign, too, sticks mainly to national issues in speeches, position papers and official pronouncements on the Internet.

But voters can make some assumptions, say those connected with the two campaigns. A second Clinton administration would be a “what you see now is what you will get” - a continuation of most current policies on such issues as timber and energy, aides said.

A Dole administration would rely on policies supported by Sens. Slade Gorton of Washington and Larry Craig and Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho, and Reps. George Nethercutt and Doc Hastings of Washington, if they win re-election, Naasz said.

There’s one law that Clinton probably will not continue - the timber salvage law, which allows the government to suspend most environmental laws for timber companies cutting trees on federal lands damaged by fire or disease.

The short-term program expires at the end of the year.

“It’s a bad idea,” said Brian Johnson, a spokesman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “It’s not necessary to waive environmental laws to do timber salvage.”

A Dole administration would likely continue the salvage program, said Gorton, a co-chairman of the Dole/ Kemp campaign. Dole voted for the law and strongly supported it, the Washington senator said.

It would also try to increase the total harvest from national forests, he added.

“President Dole’s views would be very, very close to mine on natural resource issues,” Gorton said. He described that as a “reasonable degree of balance between preservation and human needs.”

The Clinton administration will continue with so-called Option 9, which seeks to increase timber harvests to about 1 billion board feet per year in the region’s national forests, coupled with job training and economic assistance in hard-hit timber communities.

“We’ve been delivering on timber commitments. Timber jobs have stabilized,” Johnson said.

Gorton believes a Dole administration will slowly increase those goals, eventually doubling the harvest to about 2 billion board feet. But no one should expect the harvests to return to their historic highs of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

On the issue of dwindling wild salmon in the Columbia and Snake rivers, neither campaign has a solid answer. That will depend on efforts to renew the Endangered Species Act, and that, in turn, depends on the makeup of the new Congress.

“It’s a tough issue,” said Johnson, adding that Clinton hopes for a compromise on the bill, similar to those worked out this year over drinking water and pesticide laws. “We can’t speculate on what the proposals would look like.”

Gorton will be pushing a regional solution that would allow the four Northwest states - Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana - to work out solutions on salmon. He discussed it with Dole and got no commitment but “he listened to me pretty carefully.”

Salmon is a topic on which the region’s Republican senators do not always agree. If the disputes continue over such topics as river drawdowns, Gorton predicted Dole would wait until some consensus was reached among the competing states.

One of Dole’s budget reduction proposals is the elimination of the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the cleanup of more than 50 years of nuclear weapons waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

But the Republican nominee has not yet provided any details of how the nation can save money and continue the cleanup.

Although Gorton is a long-standing critic of the department, he’s not sure that Dole can find savings just by shifting functions to other parts of the government. Congress is likely to weigh any Dole proposal to eliminate the Energy Department against plans to find more efficiencies in the department.

Clinton has promised to continue the cleanup at Hanford, but the administration offers few details of possible changes in that operation, or the embattled department over the next four years.

“We wouldn’t want to presuppose a victory,” said one department spokesman designated by the campaign to explain energy policies. “I’d be happy to talk with you about it on Nov. 6.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: Where they stand…