House Funding Bill Rejects Coast Drilling Moratorium

Hobbled by partisan squabbling and indecision, the House Wednesday gave up on efforts to pass individual spending bills for many federal agencies and, despite a veto threat by President Reagan, narrowly approved a huge, $480-billion funding measure to keep much of the government running through next September.

The bill, which still needs Senate approval, rejects a renewal of the four-year-old moratorium on oil exploration efforts off California. But it includes compromise language requiring Secretary of the Interior Donald P. Hodel to resume negotiations aimed at devising a limited coastal drilling scheme with a panel of lawmakers from California and elsewhere.

In a related development, the Senate sponsor of a separate, $8.1-billion funding measure for the Interior Department tabled the bill in a maneuver that probably will ensure that the drilling compromise will survive Senate scrutiny intact. Moreover, the move could set the stage for one more legislative effort to revive the moratorium.

Before voting 212 to 208 to approve the omnibus spending bill, the House approved on a voice vote an amendment tacking on the coastal drilling compromise. Backers of a moratorium were forced to settle for the weaker arrangement after they lost a key committee vote last month to continue the drilling ban.

Agreement Canceled

In September, Hodel reneged on an agreement reached over the summer with several of the state’s lawmakers that would have limited new exploration efforts to a small number of tracts along the coast. The two sides have yet to resume negotiations and, with the end of the moratorium, the Interior Department theoretically could begin authorizing lease sales to oil companies by 1987.

Environmental groups have criticized the compromise added to the spending bill as toothless, but moratorium backers in the House struggled to put the best face on the pact.

“I was extremely disappointed we weren’t able to get a moratorium,” California Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) said. “. . . To me, the coastline belongs to all the people of America. . . . (In) the first set of negotiations, we thought we had a deal--we didn’t. Now, we want another chance.”

But California Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), a staunch advocate of increased drilling, said that waterfront recreation and offshore wells had coexisted happily in many parts of Southern California for years. He complained that colleagues from other parts of the state “smacked of elitism” when they tried to restrict drilling.

“They swim in the waters of Southern California,” Dannemeyer said. “In Central and Northern California, my friends, the water is so cold only a polar bear would go in.”

Senators’ Threat

In the Senate, both California members, Republican Pete Wilson and Democrat Alan Cranston, had threatened to demand time-consuming votes on 119 amendments to the Interior bill designed to restrict drilling. Rather than tie up the crowded Senate calendar for days with those and other amendments, Sen. James A. McClure (R-Ida.), the sponsor, tabled the spending bill.

Both Wilson and Cranston hailed the action as a victory because the separate Interior bill, which contained no language designed to either restrict drilling or force negotiations, would, if it should become law, nullify the compromise added to the House spending measure. Additionally, the pair contended that the move possibly strengthened their hand in attempting to toughen the House-passed drilling compromise when the Senate takes up the omnibus spending measure.

“If we had passed that (Interior) measure without anything in it, it would have wiped out the action taken in the House,” Cranston said.

The full spending bill passed by the House is designed to fund most government operations from Dec. 13, when stopgap funding authority runs out, through the end of fiscal 1986 next Sept. 30.

Metro Rail Funds

The transportation portion of the measure includes $429 million to build the first segment of the proposed Los Angeles Metro Rail subway. That is substantially more than the $213 million that the Senate earmarked for the project in a separate transportation bill approved earlier. The Senate is expected to try to reduce the figure again when it takes up the catch-all bill approved in the House Wednesday.

In arguing against the bill, Rep. Silvio O. Conte (R-Mass.) said that Reagan’s budget office had sent a letter to Congress that warned that the President might veto the bill because it exceeds approved budget levels for the various agencies covered by more than $12 billion. However, reflecting the ability of politicians here to divine different totals from the same sets of figures, backers of the measure claimed it was well within budget targets.