Expansionary Institute

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

Interior Choice Sends a Signal on Land Policy

December 30, 2000

By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29   As a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan's
Interior Department, Gale Norton was part of an unsuccessful effort
to persuade Congressional Democrats to open Alaska's National
Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.

Now Ms. Norton is poised to plunge back into that bitter fight,
this time as interior secretary under another Republican president
who has accused Democrats of doing too much to lock up natural
resources in the name of conservation.

With President-elect George W. Bush vowing to allow oil companies
access to the wildlife refuge, and most Democrats aligned strongly
against the plan, the battle over new oil drilling in Alaska is
shaping up as a defining controversy for the early months of the
Bush administration. And in naming Ms. Norton, 46, as his steward
of the nation's public lands, Mr. Bush has sent a strong signal
that what he has in mind   and not only in Alaska   would indeed
mark a sharp shift in course.

Except for the choice of John Ashcroft as attorney general, no
Bush cabinet selection so far may create more opposition than this
one. It was unclear how actively environmental groups might fight
to block Ms. Norton's nomination, but the Sierra Club, in
particular, commands a broad membership and has shown a willingness
to spend large amounts of money in such political battles.

A former prot g  of James Watt, Mr. Reagan's first interior
secretary, Ms. Norton has long been an outspoken advocate of
granting states, localities and even private corporations a greater
voice in environmental decisions that under Democratic leadership
have been mostly the preserve of the federal government.

"She believes very much that less regulation is better, and that
the best control is at the lowest level of government possible,"
said Matti Allbright, who served as Colorado's deputy attorney
general under Ms. Norton. "I don't think she's going to push around
those who are trying to come up with their own solutions."

In a hint of the turnabout that seems to be under way, those who
were celebrating Ms. Norton's appointment most loudly today
included groups like the oil industry and off-road enthusiasts, who
have complained that their views about federal lands were being
ignored under the Clinton administration.

At the Cato Institute, a research organization in Washington that
is a vigorous opponent of federal regulation, Jerry Taylor,
director of natural resource policy, said he and other fellows were
"popping Champagne" in celebration of Mr. Bush's choice.

"The appointment of Gale Norton is a throwing down of the gauntlet
against the constituency who believes that the federal government
needs to lock up more land or wall off existing land from further
economic exploitation," Mr. Taylor said.

By contrast, the loudest complaints came from the environmental
groups that most often came out as winners in Mr. Clinton's big
decisions, and who warned that the choice of Ms. Norton would
presage a return to darker times.

"Our view is that this is James Watt in a skirt," said Allen
Mattison, the national spokesman for the Sierra Club, suggesting
that Ms. Norton might prove as unsympathetic to conservationists as
Mr. Watt, who hired her at the Mountain States Legal Foundation
after she left the University of Denver.

As interior secretary, Mr. Watt outraged environmentalists on many
fronts, in particular by trying to bypass Congressional
restrictions in order to allow oil and gas exploration in protected
areas of the West. Mr. Watt was seen as sympathetic to the ranchers
and miners who in the late 1970's had waged what they called a
Sagebrush Rebellion against federal authority, and he could be
personally provocative, at one point ordering, for reasons of
political symbolism, that the buffalo on the Interior Department
seal, which had always faced to the left, face to the right
instead.

As attorney general, Ms. Norton was a strong advocate of
Colorado's "self-audit" law, which lets companies conduct voluntary
audits to determine whether they are complying with environmental
requirements. The law gives businesses immunity from litigation and
fines if they report and correct the violations, and it and others
like it have faced strong opposition from the Environmental
Protection Agency.


Ms. Norton later moved on to serve in the Agriculture Department
and then in the Interior Department, where she oversaw legal issues
involving endangered species and public lands.

In 1990, she was elected attorney general in Colorado, where she
defeated a three-term incumbent, and where she won re-election four
years later. Ms. Norton lost a 1996 bid for the United States
Senate when she was defeated in the Republican primary, and left
office in 1998 under Colorado's term-limits laws. She has since
been employed as senior counsel at Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber, a
leading Colorado law firm.

Ms. Norton and her husband, John G. Hughes, a commercial real
estate broker, live in Highlands Ranch, Colo., a suburb south of
Denver.

Ms. Norton has been a firm champion of the view that federal power
should be passed down to the states and other interests.

She is a member of the board of the Independence Institute, a
Colorado-based organization that describes itself as a champion of
the free market and which introduced her in 1996 as a "hero of
devolution." As attorney general, Ms. Norton succeeded in
persuading the Bush and Clinton administrations to modify rigid
environmental cleanup regulations to accelerate the cleanup of
hazardous wastes at Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapons site, and at the
Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a manufacturing point for chemical weapons.

But Ms. Norton's opposition to top- down solutions also made for
considerable frustration, her associates said, when her espousal of
Colorado- born solutions ran headlong into federal opposition. In a
1996 speech, Ms. Norton criticized what she said had been the
Clinton administration's challenges to Colorado's self-audit
approach, including what she said had been a threat to cut off
millions of dollars in federal assistance "because we had the
audacity to adopt something in environmental area."

"We'll have the opportunity to do battle once again on the issue
of the state being able to make its own decisions," she said, and
then continued: "Just as free markets triumphed over communism, we
are in a time when the intellectual debate is shifting; when we are
part of the framework that will make these things happen; when we
can be part of the intellectual battle that shift power from
Washington back to states and local communities."

In interviews today, several former associates described Ms.
Norton as a person who was willing to compromise to seek consensus.
David Kopel, a Democrat who said that Ms. Norton's conservative
background prompted some trepidation within the Colorado attorney
general's office, said she had instead proven herself to be
"conservative with a small `c,' in that she is cautious and not
inclined to push radical solutions."

"She's able to work very well across partisan barriers, and I
think that's precisely what that agency needs," said Christine
Gregoire, a Democrat who is the attorney general in Washington
State, and who chose Ms. Norton to represent Colorado and other
states in what became the $206 billion national tobacco settlement,
the largest legal settlement in history.

Phil Carlton, a tobacco industry attorney in those negotiations,
said Ms. Norton had distinguished herself among his adversaries in
that she was willing to listen to both sides of the issue.

Among the most enthusiastic responses to Ms. Norton's selection
was from the Independent Petroleum Producers Association, whose
5,000 members represent 85 percent of the oil wells drilled in the
United States. It said that Ms. Norton "understands the issues in
the West where federal land so dominates access to the natural
resource base," and that it was "looking forward to working with
her to address the energy supply problems that are so significant
in our nation today."