Senators: Clinton ‘Clueless’ About River Protection Costs

Clinton administration officials are “utterly clueless” as to how they’ll pay for cost overruns on an ecosystem-protection plan in the Columbia River basin, two Northwest Republicans charged Wednesday.

“Completion of this plan will now cost seven times more than its original, stated budget,” Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Slade Gorton, R-Wash., said in a letter to President Clinton.

“Taxpayers of the United States deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent,” they said.

Craig, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on forests, and Gorton, chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the interior, took Clinton to task for his criticism of a measure they inserted in an Interior Department spending bill requiring additional study of the plan’s costs.

Gorton and Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., have led past efforts to cut off money for the seven-state plan, which they fear will result in new restrictions on logging, mining and livestock grazing along the river, its tributaries and bordering forests.

It covers parts of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

The language in this year’s spending bill requires additional analysis of the plan’s potential impact on local economies, and a detailed estimate of the time and costs anticipated for any resulting management decisions and the expected source of those funds.

The administration originally projected the environmental reviews and other work required to complete the plan would cost about $5.5 million. So far, Congress has spent a total of $40 million on it.

Anticipated annual implementation costs also have soared, from a $48 million estimate two years ago to the latest projection of about $125 million, the senators said.

A spokesman for the White House press office referred inquiries about the senators’ letter to the White House Office on Environmental Quality, where a spokeswoman said no one was available to comment Wednesday.

Clinton signed the Interior spending bill into law earlier this month but devoted more than a page of his three-page signing statement to criticism of what he characterized as political meddling in the work of the Forest Service and other natural resource agencies.

Congress “continues to interfere with the administration’s efforts to promote ecosystem management and a greater understanding of the natural resource management issues affecting areas like the interior Columbia River Basin - an area characterized by forest health, watershed and endangered species problems,” Clinton said.

Administration officials maintain that a new big-picture management scheme is needed that takes into account the cumulative effects of logging, river management and other commercial activities on fish and wildlife in the basin.

Without that, they say, the government will be vulnerable to countless legal challenges from conservation groups intent on blocking such activities.

“Cumbersome requirements to delay a science-based plan for the basin could potentially shut down every forest in that region, hurting communities and families dependent on these forests for their livelihood,” Clinton said in his statement.

“This action may benefit a few special interests, but it injures both the environment and the economy.”

Gorton and Craig responded Wednesday: “Your statement exhibits a complete misunderstanding of the measure.”

They said their call for additional study was prompted by Clinton administration officials’ inability to respond to their questions about the overall cost of the management plan.

“Not surprisingly, since they could not tell us when they would finish the plan or at what cost, your representatives (at a Senate hearing this year) were utterly clueless as to where the additional $125 million each year to implement it would be found,” the senators said.