House Panel Votes to Lift Offshore Oil Drilling Ban

A House Appropriations subcommittee voted 7 to 6 Tuesday to lift a 14-year-old moratorium on offshore oil drilling along the coast of California, sparking immediate opposition from President Clinton.

In voting to drop the moratorium from this year’s Interior Department spending bill, the subcommittee has begun a process that could eventually lead to new oil and gas exploration and development in federal waters off California.

Shortly after the vote, Clinton issued a statement declaring, “This action is a mistake, and I will have no part of it. . . . I will not allow oil and gas drilling off our nation’s most sensitive coastlines on my watch. America’s coastlines are simply too important to our economy and our way of life.”

During the same hearing, a maneuver orchestrated by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) succeeded in stripping $600,000 from the National Park Service to run the East Mojave National Preserve--part of the landmark California Desert Protection Act that he opposed last fall.

Environmentalists saw the subcommittee actions as a double defeat. “The Republican majority is saying it doesn’t care about protecting our coast,” said Elden Hughes, a Sierra Club spokesman in Whittier. “The Republican majority is saying it doesn’t care about our national park system. And these are both national treasures the American people care very much about.”

Democrats on the committee sought to reinstate the drilling moratorium language that new Republican subcommittee Chairman Ralph Regula of Ohio opposed and had clearly signaled he would not include in the bill. But the amendment lost by one vote, in which two Republicans and one Democrat broke party ranks.

The moratorium had in recent years covered virtually all of California, Oregon and Washington, all East Coast states including most of Florida, and fishing grounds off Bristol Bay in Alaska. There are an estimated 35 drilling rigs operating on existing oil and gas leases in state and federal waters off California.

The bill heads to full committee consideration Thursday, where the issue is expected to flare again.

Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), chairman of the full House Appropriations Committee, sat in on the panel’s deliberations and made it clear where he stood.

“This thing started with the folks in San Diego not wanting to look out and see oil rigs on their pristine coastline. But it has gotten so incredibly distorted,” Livingston said. “Most of the pollution we have now comes from tankers upon which we have become more dependent as a result of this misguided and misbegotten policy.”

Despite the close vote, the outcome was never really in doubt.

Livingston represents a state where oil and natural gas interests have long been key players in state politics, while Regula has been a strong advocate of energy independence since the oil crisis of the 1970s sent fuel prices spiraling upward and produced long lines at the gas pumps.

Opponents of the moratorium advocate sensible development of the coastal oil fields before another crisis hits and say the year-to-year moratorium is an inappropriate way to deal with such an important policy issue.

But Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), who offered the amendment to reinstate the drilling ban, countered: “We should view this in a national perspective. Seventy-five percent of the best drilling areas in the country are not covered by the moratorium.”

“We’re going to lobby up to the end,” said Warner Chabot, a western regional director for the Center for Marine Conservation in San Francisco, “but we’re in deep trouble. We expected to lose in the subcommittee vote, and we’ll need every Republican vote to succeed in the full committee. Unfortunately, [Livingston] is aggressively opposed to the moratorium.”

The moratorium has the support of Gov. Pete Wilson, the governors of Florida and Alaska, and Rep. Don Young of Alaska, the new Republican chairman of the House Resources Committee.

But not all Californians are on board. Only about 30 of the 52-member House delegation have come out in favor of the moratorium.

And environmentalists are disappointed by two key Californians on the Appropriations Committee. Republican Ron Packard of Oceanside, who has supported the moratorium in the past, now favors a permanent drilling ban instead, whose legislative prospects are very uncertain. Lewis remains noncommittal on the moratorium.

“If we can’t deliver the California votes,” Chabot said, “we hand over the coastline to the oil companies.”

On the East Mojave funding issue, the subcommittee on another 7-6 vote effectively put the 1.4-million-acre preserve back in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management to be run again as a multiuse scenic area, a move that could restore use of the land to cattlemen, miners and off-road-vehicle operators that last year’s Congress sought to limit.

The diversion left the National Park Service just $1 to run the new preserve.

The subcommittee also turned down a budget request of $1.7 million, holding funding to the $600,000 allocated last year, a sum environmentalists say is insufficient to manage a preserve that is fast becoming a national attraction.

“This means you end up with a very small crew, mostly on loan from other places, and you don’t have supplies for toilet paper or tires or anything,” Hughes said. “The BLM has had 15 years to show us how seriously they can mismanage the desert, catering to the people who use up the natural resources, rather than protecting the natural resources.”

Lewis argues that the National Park Service has trampled on the rights of miners, campers and others who have sought to use the land since the Park Service took it over as a preserve last October.

“Management of the East Mojave has been a public relations nightmare for the National Park Service. Lifelong residents and longtime users of the Mojave Desert are reacting in a strong and clear voice to the heavy-handed manner in which they are being treated . . . like second-class citizens in their own back yard,” said Lewis, citing owners of a mine whom the Park Service blocked from going forward with a business plan.

But Interior officials in Washington saw Tuesday’s action as an attack on the national park system that will probably not stop at the Mojave. Proponents of desert protection warned that funds might similarly be threatened for preserves at Death Valley and Joshua Tree, also created by last year’s landmark desert bill.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who led the desert bill to passage, called the attempt to strip National Park Service of funding “nothing but a back-door attempt to derail the California Desert Protection Act.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) introduced legislation Tuesday that would bar federal leasing in areas where coastal states--like California--have already banned oil exploration.

Also contributing to this article was David Phinney of States News Service.