Andrus Center for Public Policy Blog

Remembering Hatfield

The Shield of Moral Rectitude Earlier this month one of the true senatorial “statesman” from the Pacific Northwest states, former five-term senator and two-term governor from Oregon, 89-year-old Mark O. Hatfield, was laid to rest. By definition, a “statesman” is one who rises above petty partisan interests, is an independent thinker who puts the best …

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Double Down

Who Survives? USFS or NPS I’d like to combine two of the recent posts in this space by Chris Carlson and offer up a provocative wager to our readers. To set the stage: Chris opined, and I agree, that we’d likely see a push to overturn the Winters Doctrine pertaining to Native American water rights …

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Half Way There

Mark Trahant on the lousy economy… Writing recently at the NewWest website, author and Fort Hall, Idaho resident Mark Trahant says the United States is halfway into a “lost decade” of economic growth. Trahant says: “The late, great author Wallace Stegner wrote about the idea of a West populated by federal employees in Salt Lake …

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Western Water

It’s All About Water, Stupid! With apologies to James Carville, the political consultant who came up with Bill Clinton’s campaign mantra – “it’s the economy, stupid,” the future in the American west is all about water, its allocation, its cost and its rapid depletion. Scientists, naturalists, writers, farmers and ranchers, politicians are all too aware …

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Dam Politics

You Can’t Make ‘Em Like That Anymore When the famous photographer Margaret Bourke-White made her iconic 1936 Life magazine cover shot of the still under construction spillway at Fort Peck Dam – the very first cover of the magazine – the country had no environmental impact statements. A cost-benefit analysis? Huh, what’s that? There was …

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Remembering Hatfield Double Down Half Way There Western Water Dam Politics

Aug
12

Remembering Hatfield

People

by Chris Carlson

The Shield of Moral Rectitude

Earlier this month one of the true senatorial “statesman” from the Pacific Northwest states, former five-term senator and two-term governor from Oregon, 89-year-old Mark O. Hatfield, was laid to rest. By definition, a “statesman” is one who rises above petty partisan interests, is an independent thinker who puts the best interests of the nation ahead of partisanship, especially policies steeped in intolerant ideology.

Though a solid Republican, his ability to work across the aisle was duly noted as well as his principles and fine character. Longtime observer and participant on both the regional and national political stages, former Governor and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus, said that Hatfield and the late Washington Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, were the two “giants, and the two greatest statesman in the Senate” that he’d seen in his 50 plus years of political activity.

As a rookie reporter in Washington, D.C., I covered northwest issues for an independent news bureau run by A. Robert Smith. While Bob had the lead for our seven Oregon clients, and I had the lead for our three Alaska clients as well as the six Idaho papers that took a weekly column I wrote, we backed up each other often. Thus, I was frequently in Hatfield’s office as a part of my daily rounds.

Soft-spoken, articulate, thoughtful, courteous, patient, a quick smile to go along with a quick mind, an impeccable dresser, and a history buff, especially of the Civil War and the role President Abraham Lincoln (a bust of Lincoln sat in a prominent place in the office) played, are the associations that come back to mind.

There was something else, though, that really differentiated him from most of his colleagues: he radiated decency, probity and moral rectitude. A reporter, just like Oregon voters, knew Mark Hatfield was the real deal, a genuine person, a man of character and values.

He always answered questions directly and forthrightly though at times one felt he leaned almost too far over to ensure he did justice to the complexity and ambiguity that so often lies at the heart of any difficult issue or question. The very first “Carlson Report” I penned from D.C. for my Idaho clients on April 11, 1971, was a speculative piece on Hatfield’ future. It was titled “A Republican Gene McCarthy?” and was derived from the fact that independent Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey from California was citing Hatfield as a possible presidential primary challenger to the already harried Richard Nixon.

Indeed, it is said that Hatfield was on Nixon’s short list of potential vice presidential running mates in 1968 and he unquestionably would have been a far better choice than Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, who resigned the vice-presidency in disgrace before Nixon resigned the presidency. Had Nixon chosen Hatfield there would have been no disgrace and the Oregon senator would have become president.

Asked about McCloskey’s forwarding his name, one has to admire Hatfield’s candor: “I can’t support such a move and I’m not involved but I’m not going to tell McCloskey what to do either way,” he said. Then he added “I don’t see a primary challenge taking place, but I’m not ruling it out.”

Despite serious reservations about the Vietnam War, Hatfield was nominally going to remain loyal to his party’s president. Asked whether the advancing of his name might lead to his replacing a dumped Spiro Agnew, Hatfield said his elevation onto the ticket was as unrealistic as Nixon being denied renomination, but then added that under certain circumstances he would accept the second spot on such a “schizophrenic” ticket.

Pure candor and honesty, and why not? Hatfield had already been through the accusation from hell, and knew from personal experience that his aura of probity and rectitude had helped him win his first term as governor in 1958.

The fact is Mark Hatfield went to his grave carrying the awful burden when just shy of 18 years of age having accidently hit and killed a seven year old girl who had suddenly darted in front of his car. It was a horrible tragedy for all involved and profoundly impacted the senator the rest of his life.

What compounded the tragic event, which happened in 1940, was that Oregon’s maverick U.S. Senator, Wayne Morse, decided to inject the tragedy into the 1958 re-election campaign of his Democratic colleague, Gov. Robert Holmes, without even informing Holmes. The story is recounted in A. Robert Smith’s fine biography of Morse.

In speeches in several places Morse charged that Hatfield, though never charged with anything, had not testified honestly in a civil suit brought by the girl’s parents, and he made much of the fact that a jury had awarded the plaintiffs modest compensation which had been sustained on appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court.

It was a classic case of Morse, the former law school dean, making a questionable interpretation of a very legal matter and trying to turn it to political advantage. Hatfield, who the day he decided to enter politics, knew somewhere, someday some one would try to tarnish him with this tragedy, had put into the file a brief statement deploring the re-opening of the scar of this tragedy and urging compassion for all involved.

Oregon voters were quick to condemn Morse with an unconscionable crossing of a line that shouldn’t be crossed, and while most observers believe Hatfield would have won anyway, the expected election turned into a complete route of Holmes. It was a classic backfire and to this day serves as a reminder to politicians not to try to take advantage of personal human tragedies.

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Jun
22

Double Down

by John Freemuth

Who Survives? USFS or NPS

I’d like to combine two of the recent posts in this space by Chris Carlson and offer up a provocative wager to our readers.

To set the stage: Chris opined, and I agree, that we’d likely see a push to overturn the Winters Doctrine pertaining to Native American water rights if we begin to see chronic water shortages in the western U.S. In fact he offered to wager on his prediction. Given our treatment of native peoples I won’t take his wager. I’m not sure about the water rights of other federal reservations, either.

Then, in another post, he suggested why former Gov and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus had reservations about turning over much of Alaska to the National Park Service. Chris argues that NPS lands in Alaska have become playgrounds for the rich, while at the same time drawing our attention to a rather heavy handed NPS response to someone who had apparently violated regulations on one of the Alaska units of the park system. Fear of over-use led Andrus and others to support the National Recreation Area concept in the Sawtooths, Hells Canyon and the White Clouds. Andrus also crossed swords with the late Paul Fritz who I came to know well, but who could be zealot for NPS management of the Sawtooths. The Sawtooths clearly are not a playground for the rich, but, ironically there is a small town a little way down the road that certainly has that reputation.

So here’s the wager: which bureau has a better chance to survive the next one hundred years: the National Park Service or the U.S. Forest Service? (Disclaimer: I was seasonal ranger for NPS at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area at Wahweap and Lees Ferry).

The NPS may be best seen as the keeper of much of our iconic nature and history. However, a recent book by Paul Berkowitz titled The Case of the Indian Trader: Billy Malone and the National Park Service Investigation at Hubbell Trading Post reveals a darker side of the bureau I came to admire.

On the other hand, I also came to admire and work with many people from USFS during my time in Idaho, even getting to spend a few days in the woods with the Idaho’s forest supervisors, as Governor Andrus often did. But if one follows the dust up over that agency’s attempt to redo its planning regulations (again) it suggest tough times for that bureau as well.

I think NPS has a better chance to survive because its mission is clearer. I think USFS has a very good chance to survive if we can come up with a clear vision of what America’s forests are for.

If we look at all the ideas, proposals and think pieces that have floated around, hardly anyone except Milton Friedman has argued for the abolishment of national parks, but plenty of folks have argued for transferring forest lands to the states.

The sometimes irascible law professor George Coggins, of the definitive Coggins Wilkinson, Leshy and Fischman’s Federal Public Land and Resources Law fame, once suggested, at a conference we spoke at, that NPS be merged with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service be merged with the Bureau of Land Management. A woman in the audience rose and announced that she was offended because of the grand tradition of her agency….I think it was either NPS or USFS but I can’t remember for certain. Coggins’ response: “Well madam, be offended”.

So what will it be? Who will survive, why should they and what will it take? And who is offended?

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Jun
21

Half Way There

Economy

by Marc Johnson

Mark Trahant on the lousy economy…

Writing recently at the NewWest website, author and Fort Hall, Idaho resident Mark Trahant says the United States is halfway into a “lost decade” of economic growth. Trahant says:

“The late, great author Wallace Stegner wrote about the idea of a West populated by federal employees in Salt Lake City and Boise or any city where government agencies have regional offices. He once told historian Richard Etulain that states ‘get an awful lot in federal payrolls and an awful lot of jobs and homes and everything else from the federal government.’ The West, he said, should acknowledge the federal government is not only a ‘permanent partner in that collaboration, but a very essential one, absolutely essential.’”

“Yet as we in the reddest of red states demand federal contraction, we forgot how many of our neighbors actually work for the government. Of course government is already shrinking—and as that trend grows it will impact everyone because when those workers lose their jobs, they will not have money to spend as consumers. That’s essential in a consumer-driven economy such as ours. On top of that, state, cities, schools, and other governments are trimming jobs making the contraction that much deeper.”

Read Mark’s full piece at www.newwest.net

(Editor’s note: Mark Trahant’s recent book is The Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars: Henry M. Jackson, Forrest J. Gerard and the campaign for the self-determination of America’s Indian Tribes.)

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Jun
15

Western Water

Water

by Chris Carlson

It’s All About Water, Stupid!

With apologies to James Carville, the political consultant who came up with Bill Clinton’s campaign mantra – “it’s the economy, stupid,” the future in the American west is all about water, its allocation, its cost and its rapid depletion.

Scientists, naturalists, writers, farmers and ranchers, politicians are all too aware of its scarcity beyond the 100^th Meridian especially as duly noted and popularized by John Wesley Powell, famed explorer of the Grand Canyon and first head of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Layer on the issue of global warming and many scientists think the arid west will become even hotter and drier, and that the desertification process will accelerate. Cities that we had neither right nor common sense in building, such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, are requiring ever increasing amounts of water, and are willingly paying farmers and ranchers princely sums to surrender their water rights, while pipelines hundreds of miles long are constructed to get the water to these thirsty cities.

This growing need for ever more potable water has fueled the drive for even more impoundments to store winter run-off and capture what little largess drops from the skies on occasion. The late Marc Reisner captured the illogic of much of this in his seminal study, Cadillac Desert, a must read for all who want to understand what has shaped the politics of the west for years and will continue to shape its politics.

It doesn’t take rocket science to foresee the coming conflict between agricultural use and culinary and human use. Determining highest and best use will be decided by the market place, not in board rooms of large corporations or the committee meeting rooms of state legislatures.

Nor does it take rocket science to predict two major developments regarding water and the future:

1) Those that have an abundance of water, ground water or a sizable underground aquifer, are going to prosper and those that don’t are going to flounder. Thus, 100 years from now Spokane with the vast and so far unmapped and unplumbed Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer will be a thriving city with lots of manufacturing transplanted from California. And Las Vegas, with its dwindling sources of water, may become a mere shadow of what it was during its glory days.

2) Congress will repeal the so-called Winters Doctrine of 1908. Why, because Congress will conclude the Supreme Court vested too much power in indigenous Native American tribes by in effect placing their water rights “first in time” and therefore “first in right.”

I pondered all this while traveling to Fort Peck Dam and Glasgow, Montana, recently to attend a conference on the future cost of water sponsored by Montana State University’s Wheeler Center. Along the way the highway ran beside and at times crossed the Milk River, the very river the subject of litigation that lead to the so-called Winters Doctrine proclaimed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908.

Without going into a dissertation on western water law, the ruling in the Winters case grew out of a section of the 1902 Water Reclamation Act that created the Bureau of Reclamation within the Department of the Interior. Lower courts ruled that a section of that law gave implied power to the federal government, “federally reserved water rights” was the key phrase, to among other things establish first in time rights to water even though most water is in a state’s purview (Most states own outright the beds of rivers and navigable streams and sometimes their lakes while the Federal government regulates most activities especially interstate commerce upon those waters.).

Within the Interior Department its various bureaus concluded that rights to water for Indian nations were established at the time the various tribes signed their first treaty with the U.S. government. In the Winters case a group of ranchers and farmers who settled in and around the Milk River challenged the first in time first in right designation for the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes, and I’m sure to their stunning surprise lost not only in two lower courts but before the Supreme Court, 8 to 1.

Ironically, despite the Wheeler Conference’s proximity to the Milk River, no one mentioned the Winters Doctrine or its potential impact on water cost. The doctrine gives prior right and first right to ALL the water arising on or passing through an Indian reservation.

Needless to say state water departments try hard to have tribes quantify their needs so downstream allocations can then be made, especially in times of water shortages. Idaho is in fact going through a series of water basin adjudication processes, and in the case of the Snake River Basin Adjudication the Nez Perce Tribe received a multi-million dollar settlement to quantify its rights.

On the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene River Basin adjudication the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has thus far not filed its claim nor thrown out a negotiating number, but one can expect it too will be hefty.

As water grows scarcer in the west, bidding for unused water rights will grow astronomically. Water could turn out to be truly liquid gold for some tribes, and perhaps generate more dollars ultimately than even lucrative gaming ventures.

Pessimists will look at that and conclude that history will repeat itself and the majority culture will once again figure out a legal way to extinguish an Indian right. Anyone want to make a wager and put it in a time capsule?

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May
18

Dam Politics

by Marc Johnson

You Can’t Make ‘Em Like That Anymore

When the famous photographer Margaret Bourke-White made her iconic 1936 Life magazine cover shot of the still under construction spillway at Fort Peck Dam – the very first cover of the magazine – the country had no environmental impact statements. A cost-benefit analysis? Huh, what’s that?

There was no Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1930′s to assess how the massive dam across the Missouri River would impact fish or whether whole species might be endangered by drastically altering habitat. The Fort Peck Tribes weren’t consulted. The states of Montana and North Dakota had little role beyond having their federal elected officials weigh in on the project.

In fact, Fort Peck was constructed with no congressional authorization whatsoever. Franklin D. Roosevelt simply decided to build the dam after he was lobbied by Montana Sen. Burton K. Wheeler and others. Roosevelt could do that because the Congress had granted him, and him alone, the authority under New Deal-era relief legislation to spend billions of dollars building things and putting thousands of the unemployed back to work.

Construction began on Fort Peck late in 1933 and by 1936 more than 10,000 were laboring on the massive project in the far northeastern corner of Montana. They built a town – Fort Peck – as the administrative center of the Corps of Engineers project, but many workers preferred to set up housekeeping in haphazardly constructed shanty town with names like New Deal and Wheeler. The booze ran day and night in these places even though Montana was still legally dry. The prices were sky high but you could buy anything, including certain services in an area known as Happy Hollow. Over the course of construction at Fort Peck, it was largely finished by 1940, it is estimated that 50,000 different people were employed on the dam.

All this becomes truly amazing to consider when you also realize that nearly the same level of construction was underway at Grand Coulee Dam on the upper Columbia in Washington and Bonneville Dam downstream in Oregon. Three massive, expensive public works projects underway at the same time. It simply couldn’t happen today. Times and politics and priorities are so much different.

Creating the political consensus alone today to build such a big project would be next to impossible. The permitting and environmental analysis alone would cost more than one of the big dams cost in the 1930′s. It’s probably all too the good. We have a different – and mostly better – political and policy making process now than FDR had to contend with – or was it relish – during the Great Depression.

Barack Obama’s stimulus package is still roundly debated in Washington and across the country and its doubtful if such legislation could be passed at the moment. Yet, what FDR did in 1933 in rural Montana was precisely the idea behind the “stimulus” spending that the country tried in 2009

Fort Peck was enormously popular. Obama’s stimulus not so much. One poll a year ago found nearly two-thirds of Americans thinking the effort had been a failure.

When Sen. Wheeler ran for re-election in 1934, having championed the dam, he won Montana’s Valley County where the dam is located by a rather comfortable margin of 83% to 17%. He swamped his GOP opponent statewide with 70% of the vote. It didn’t hurt Wheeler that his Republican opponent criticized the New Deal and said Fort Peck would be just a “nice duck or fish pond.”

Perhaps the difference from 1933 to 2009, from a long-ago Fort Peck Dam project to a current freeway interchange project, was that Roosevelt’s Depression-era stimulus spending was so very obvious. It’s hard to miss what was then the world’s largest earthen dam under construction or 10,000 workers building tar paper shacks on the plains of Montana and featured on the color cover of a glossy new magazine.

It’s been said, correctly, that the era of the big dams is dead and gone. We’ll likely never see another Fort Peck or Grand Coulee, and that’s probably a good thing for a lot of reasons. Still, those massive, job-producing projects were a godsend at a time when politics and policy were more easily controlled and when we naively believed, given enough dirt and manpower, that we could bend Mother Nature while we cured the economy.

I spoke at a water conference recently in the shadow of Fort Peck Dam and sponsored by the B.K. Wheeler Center at Montana State University. I talked about the remarkable political history of the dam but, before unwinding the tale, I asked the audience for a show of hands. How many thought the dam could be built today? Many in the audience grew up with Fort Peck as a neighbor and not a person raised a hand.

Someone suggested later that it was a good question, but another good one would have been: should it have been built? A more difficult question to answer, I suspect. It was built and it still stands as a monument to a different time. Go see it if you get close. We’re not building them like that anymore.

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May
16

A Better Way?

by Chris Carlson

A Department of Natural Resources?

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was in Boise during the Easter week congressional recess. During his visit he spent part of a day touring the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) at the Boise Airport. the air arm of joint Bureau of Land Management/Forest Service efforts to combat wildfires.

NIFC is an example of unusually good cooperation between the federal government’s two largest land management agencies. Secretary Salazar later met with some 300 employees of the Fire Center and joining him at the front of the room was Bob Abbey, current head of the BLM, Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson, and former four-term Idaho governor and Interior Secretary Cecil D. Andrus.

Seeing this example of interagency cooperation must have sparked some interest on the part of Secretary Salazar because reportedly at subsequent dinner the former Colorado senator asked several leading questions of his dinner guests, Simpson and the executive director of the Idaho Conservation League Rick Johnson.

Simpson, now the chairman of the influential House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the budget of both the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, provided some good advice to Secretary Salazar.

As the Interior secretary tried to digest the logic of where some federal agencies find themselves on the government’s organizational chart, he learned from Simpson, who is skilled in many legislative matters not to mention steeped in history, that pure personal anger on the part of President Richard Nixon resulted in the EPA becoming a separate agency rather than a division within the Interior Department. At the time EPA was created, Nixon was ticked off at then-Interior Secretary Wally Hickel’s less than forthright defense of Nixon’s Vietnam policies.

Simpson’s advice to Salazar: do your homework and then have the president show some leadership by utilizing the presidential authority he already has to move agencies and divisions around at the cabinet level. The former Speaker of the Idaho House knows that is the only practical way executive reorganization can be done. He also knows that any administration worth its salt can block legislative efforts to undo such executive action within the 60 days allowed for Congress to reverse this kind of Presidential leadership.

As President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of the Interior, Andrus can vouch for this exercise of presidential leadership approach to managing the federal bureaucracy.

In 1979, as President Carter was moving ahead with plans to create a federal Department of Natural Resources that would include the Forest Service, BLM, NOAA and a host of other agencies that should logically be housed under the same roof, Andrus pleaded with the president to utilize an executive order rather than to seek – and likely not get – Congressional authorization.

Andrus’ worst fears were soon realized. The special interest mobilized to defeat the perceived threat to their “K” Street lobbying contracts and maintain their cushy camaraderie with the congressional leadership and the chairmen of important committees.

Andrus, having served in a state legislature for eight years, instinctively knew that coalitions would quickly form to nit-pick to death the Carter proposal. And he knew from his barnstorming tour of editorial boards around the nation that most editorial page editors were highly skeptical that the Carter approach would work, as were many of the lobbyists hustling up to the Hill to wine and dine members or key staff.

The day came all too soon when Andrus knew the Department of Natural Resources “dog would no longer hunt.” He called up the president’s executive assistant, Jack Watson, to set up a meeting with the president to discuss cutting their losses and withdrawing the proposal.

When Andrus got there, much to his surprise, it was not a private meeting. Instead, seven members of the “Georgia Mafia” were seated around the President.

Without notes or any supporting analytical white paper Andrus launched into a spirited recitation about why the President should not jeopardize other aspects of his legislative agenda in the hopes of winning a hopeless campaign to bring some rhyme and reason to the Interior Department’s organizational structure.

Andrus later told his staff that when he finished there was the longest period of silence he could possibly imagine before the late Jody Powell, Carter’s astutue press secretary, spoke up to support what the secretary had said. The other Georgia Mafia present, folks like domestic policy advisor Stu Eizenstat, chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, and Watson then chimed in also.

The lesson to be gained is indeed that which Rep. Simpson implicitly understands – any administration must exercise real leadership if it wants to move agencies and bureaus around. A base of support is essential, but so is the use of an executive order, which, with the right support can stave off any Congressional attempt to maintain the status quo.

NIFC is a model for agency cooperation. Re-writing the federal organizational chart influenced by a heavy dose of common sense would provide even more opportunity to create a better functioning federal government. Leadership is the key ingredient.

(A slightly different version of this piece appeared recently in the St. Maries, Idaho Gazette-Record.)

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Apr
28

The Park Service and Alaska

Alaska

by Chris Carlson

Over the Horizon

Former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus’s uncanny ability to look over the horizon and see how the future might unfold is one of the many hallmarks that make him such a unique figure not just on Idaho’s landscape, but the nation’s. A reminder of this occurred recently in Alaska in a piece by writer Craig Medred. Craig was writing in the Alaska Dispatch about a trial in Fairbanks.

One of those cantankerous iconoclastic Alaskan outback figures is on trial for not following the rules and regulations within the boundaries of one of the National Parks created by the landmark – and Andrus led – Alaska lands set aside legislation. That legislation, among other things, doubled the size of the National Park system when President Carter signed it into law in the waning days of his administration in 1980.

Testimony during the trial revealed a classic, heavy handed over-reaction by the Park Service as literally a SWAT-team descended on the guy to arrest him and haul him off to jail. The image of NPS police holding a shotgun to the head of the alleged criminal perpetrator said it all.

Medred had been one of a contingent of national and Alaskan reporters taking part in a tour I had put together at the behest of then-Interior Secretary Andrus during the summer of 1979. The tour was to showcase the many “crown jewels” in Alaska proposed for permanent protection. The ten-day tour was designed to educate a national audience to what was at stake for all Americans in perpetuity in these unique public lands.

The tour was a smashing success with hundreds of articles and news clips appearing in major publications from the Los Angeles Times to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, from the Seattle P-I to the Boston Globe. Alaska’s senior senator, crusty acerbic Ted Stevens of course charged Secretary Andrus with lobbying with public funds but there was little he could do but fume.

During the course of this tour in which plenty of time was allowed for reporters to spend time hiking and fishing as well as watching birds or, at a distance, Alaskan caribou and grizzly, the Secretary and Craig wandered off to do a little fly fishing.

Medred correctly recalled that while casting Andrus opined that one of the few reservations he had about the push to create these new additions to the nation’s protected lands was turning over some of the most scenic tracts to management by the National Park Service. Andrus opined that it would be better for all if the lands were declared part of the wilderness system managed by the U.S. Forest Service.

His concern was legitimate and prescient as anyone visiting Alaska today knows. The National Park Service, much as Andrus feared, has ham-handedly lost the trust and respect of many Alaskans living adjacent to the vast, protected tracts. They are viewed as play grounds for the rich from the lower 48 who trek to Alaska during the two months of the year when the weather is nice, there’s almost 20 hours of daylight, and they can ride a tour bus or, fully clad in recent purchases from an Orvis Fly Shop descend upon streams to flail away in search of a trophy.

Alaskan newspapers document numerous instances over the years where the NPS over-manages and displays an amazing lack of tact and diplomacy to the point that many of its personnel live in isolation from their neighbors who make their contempt for these federal bureaucrats well known.

So how did Andrus come to know that this was something to be worried about?

Experience, pure and simple. While governor in his first two terms he dealt with representatives of the Interior agency who were casting covetous eyes on the Sawtooths, the White Clouds and Hells Canyon in Idaho. All of these areas were then being managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Familiarizing himself with what one could and could not do in a national park, Andrus quickly concluded their management scheme would be way too restrictive for the tastes of adjacent Idaho landowners and those that love to hunt and fish in Idaho’s back-country.

He also intuitively understood that a designation as a National Park could quickly lead to an area being “loved to death” by an influx of folks who trek to the parks precisely because of their notoriety.

He quickly settled on the “national recreation area” designation as the preferred management approach. Such a scheme would keep the Forest Service in the lead as the land manager. The idea didn’t sit well with everyone, including the late Paul Fritz who then managed the only piece of Park Service turf in Idaho, Craters of the Moon National Monument.

Over the years Andrus also watched as Forest Service personnel by and large did a good job of integrating themselves into the communities where they lived by working with their neighbors in a truly neighborly way.

Several times during his four terms as governor he would disappear for a few day horse-packing trip into some remote part of Idaho’s back-country with the supervisors of Idaho’s national forests and a few of their regional bosses out of Ogden and Missoula. He never took staff, nor did they.

It’s amazing how seemingly insoluble challenges can give way to possible solutions when sitting around a campfire at night in some remote corner of the proposed Mallard-Larkins wilderness area, for example.

The key to effective management, I’m sure Andrus would say, reflects what he has always practiced – understand that public office is a public trust, know that a public servant is just that – a servant. The public is the boss. Listen because there is a collective wisdom to the public sense of propriety. Use common sense and never stop working to figure out the greatest good for the greatest number.

If Cece Andrus were still Secretary of the Interior I suspect there’d be man Park Service personnel being sent to charm school to learn the old lesson that a dab of honey usually goes much further than a bucket of vinegar.

(Chris Carlson directed the Department of the Interior’s Office of Public Affairs during the Carter Administration.)

Tags: Alaska, National Park Service

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Apr
28

Go Easy on the Parks

National Parks

by Marc Johnson

A Stand Against Racing

Dr. John Freemuth, Senior Fellow at the Andrus Center for Public Policy and a professor of political science at Boise State University, wrote recently on a national park controversy in Colorado involving bike racing.

“I hold with Wallace Stegner,” Freemuth wrote, ”that ‘national parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, the 95-year old park system reflects us at our best rather than our worst.’”

The rest of John’s piece at High Country News.

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Apr
25

Teton Dam

Bureau of Reclamation

by Chris Carlson

To rebuild or not to rebuild?

A couple days after the Teton Dam catastrophically collapsed in eastern Idaho on June 5^th, 1976, causing the deaths of 11 people, millions of dollars in damages as well as displacing hundreds from their homes and ruining thousands of acres of productive cropland, Gov. Cecil D. Andrus flew into Rexburg in a National Guard helicopter.

He had been on an inspection flight and was simply stunned by the destruction the collapse of the 305-foot Bureau of Reclamation built dam had wrought.

The chopper landed near the Administration Building of what was then known as Ricks College and today is Brigham Young University – Idaho. A group of newspaper and television reporters, with cameras in tow, spotted him getting out of the chopper and came charging across the lawn.

The first one to reach the governor was a television reporter from KSL-TV in Salt Lake City. He breathlessly threw out the first question: “Governor, are you going to rebuild the dam?” Andrus’ eyes flashed in anger at the insensitivity and the impropriety of the question.

Using some choice words, which shouldn’t be repeated, the governor proceeded to tell the reporter what an insensitive, clod he was for asking such an inane question.

The question was premature by about 35 years. Yes, it is still a controversial question with strong feelings on both sides in the Upper Snake River Valley. According to a February article by Sven Berg in the Idaho Falls Post-Register the issue is being vigorously debated in homes and coffee shops. Rocky Barker also reported on the issue in the Idaho Statesman.

Surprisingly, the anti-dam building lobbying group, American Rivers, sponsored a survey of 300 folks living in eastern Idaho (The survey polled Idahoans from Twin Falls County east to Wyoming and has a plus or minus margin of 6%).

The group was astute enough to use Moore Information, a Portland-based political/public affairs polling firm that has worked on the campaigns of almost all major Republican office holders in Idaho, including Gov. Butch Otter, Congressman Mike Simpson and Sen. James Risch.

Moore’s polling showed the region still sharply divided and memories still fresh regarding the dam. The Moore poll showed 45% in favor of rebuilding Teton and 34% opposed. As Moore himself noted to the reporter: “There isn’t a huge groundswell of opinion behind rebuilding that thing.”

In fact, the poll clearly showed that the public preferred less costly option that would do less harm to the environment. Asked if they preferred making improvements in water efficiency to rebuilding the Teton Dam, by a 63% to 26% margin respondents overwhelmingly said yes.

Moore went on to say “Cost aside, the poll also found broad and deep support among respondents for protecting the region’s rivers for their natural and recreational values.”

Though recognizing the need for more water storage throughout the Snake River basin, for his part Gov, Andrus has always been skeptical about the site. Before heading off to Washington, D.C., to serve in the cabinet of President Jimmy Carter, Andrus ordered the Idaho Department of Water Resources (IDWR) to conduct its own review of what went wrong.

Thus, when the Interior Department Solicitor, Leo Krulitz came by a couple years later to ask what I thought Secretary Andrus’ reaction would be if Interior sued the dam contractor, the huge Boise-based construction firm of Morrison-Knudsen, I was able to tell him “that dog won’t hunt.”

“The first witness M-K attorneys will call will be the Secretary who will testify to the fact that IDWR’s review absolved M-K of any blame. The state of Idaho had concluded that M-K built the dam to the criteria specified. The flaw was with the designers in the Bureau of Reclamation, not with the contractor,” Krulitz was informed.

The solicitor backed off.

The dam suffered from a flawed design, but also a flawed site. Any one who has ever watched the eerie film of the dam collapsing instinctively understands the flawed design that water was able to get in and around the side supports, literally melting away the underlying soil and rock, thus bringing on the disaster.

Andrus concluded that despite the hubris of engineers who think they can build anything anywhere, that particular site would never again past muster.

So it is with some surprise that Idahoans have been reading about the latest example of human hubris. Andrus is one of those rare people who always learned from the few mistakes he made and moved on. The state of Idaho and the good folks of the Upper Snake River Valley would be well advised to take their cue and follow his lead.

(Chris is a board member of the Andrus Center and the former Director of Public Affairs for the Department of the Interior.)

Tags: Teton Dam

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Feb
11