Mischief on Oil Leasing

The effort by the Senate Appropriations Committee to speed up the leasing of Southern California coastal waters to the oil companies is even more perfidious and outrageous than it seemed at first. The initial reports on the committee’s action this past week said only that it would require Southern California Lease Sale No. 95 to be held by the start of August, 1989, rather than the following January.

But a close reading of the amendment to the Interior appropriations bill alarmed leasing opponents even more because the action also had the effect of exempting the sale from any further environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The committee declared that environmental-impact statements for previous Southern California sales, the last of which was held in 1984, could be deemed to be an adequate substitute for a new environmental report. This also would eliminate the requirement for any public hearings on the proposed leasing of the outer continental shelf from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.

The Southern California lease sale originally was scheduled in September, 1989, but was set back to early 1990 by the Department of the Interior, along with several other sales, because of a heavy workload. Part of the burden was the large number of comments filed against a proposed Northern California lease sale. Interior Department officials said that they would not have time to complete the required environmental reviews to meet the original schedule.

The Senate committee’s action is an unprecedented flouting of basic environmental law as well as of the detailed statute providing for the leasing of the outer continental shelf only after extensive environmental review and public comment. The full Senate should reject this proposal; if it does not, the House must insist that it be stricken when the House-Senate conference committee negotiates a compromise Interior appropriations bill.