Enemies Unite to Urge Ban on Oil Drilling : Environment: Legislators from both parties launch dual strategies to keep a moratorium on exploration in coastal waters. A close House vote is predicted.

A coalition of California legislators, some of them bitter political enemies, joined forces Wednesday in an effort to rescue a 14-year moratorium on offshore oil drilling, launching a dual strategy to extend the ban another year and then make it permanent.

The next showdown comes today, when an House Appropriations Committee takes up this year’s Interior Department spending bill that--for the first time since 1983--contains no moratorium on coastal gas and oil exploration.

“We’ve been doing a daily, now hourly, vote count and it looks frankly like a very close vote in the committee,” said Rep. Frank Riggs (R-Ukiah) who, joined by Democrat Sam Farr of Carmel, will press an amendment to the spending bill that would extend the moratorium for another year. “Our nation’s coastlines are too precious for anyone to play partisan political games with.”

The battle got under way in earnest Tuesday when a divided appropriations subcommittee voted 7 to 6 to kill the moratorium, which could make way for new drilling in federal waters not only off the California shoreline, but much of the West and East coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. Joined by legislators from at least half a dozen other coastal states, a group of California legislators promptly rallied in a rare show of bipartisanship to protect the coastline from what they called as much an economic threat as an environmental one.

“Coastal tourism brings in $27 million a year to our state of California,” said Rep. Andrea Seastrand (R-Santa Barbara). “New offshore oil drilling jeopardizes coastal tourism and the economies of our coastal communities.”

Although the issue has brought together otherwise partisan enemies, it has failed to unite the ever-fractious California delegation, which rarely agrees on any issue. At last count, only about 30 of the state’s 52 House members had come out in favor of the moratorium. (The Florida delegation, by contrast, was said to be united.)

Two key votes are Republican Reps. Ron Packard of Oceanside and Jerry Lewis of Redlands, both Appropriations Committee members. Packard, whose coastal district also includes Laguna Beach, Dana Point and San Clemente, has long opposed offshore drilling. But this year he has indicated that he will hold out for a permanent ban rather than settle for a yearlong renewal. Lewis remains uncommitted. And the discourse today promises to be lively.

“There will be people crossing party lines on this, making for an interesting, even eclectic debate,” Riggs said, noting that Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston (R-La.) is so set against the moratorium that he has promised to hand off the gavel so he will be free to do battle against it.

Even if they win today, California legislators made it clear that they are no longer content with a ban that must be renewed yearly, and will remain in significant danger as long as the new Republican majority stays in power.

Riggs is collecting sponsors for two bills he intends to introduce in a few weeks, one banning offshore drilling in California and Florida through 2000 and another outlawing any new oil and gas exploration on the nation’s outer continental shelf. But congressional observers are uncertain whether the political will exists to pass either one. And in a Congress lately intent on undoing landmark environmental legislation, even a yearlong extension of the moratorium would be a considerable victory for environmentalists.

“There should be a comprehensive, permanent ban on new offshore drilling,” Riggs said during a news conference Wednesday, where legislators stood in a sweltering Washington heat to declare their intentions to preserve the pristine coastline. “But while a permanent solution makes its way through the Congress, we should have the security of a ban solidly in place for one additional year.”

Environmentalists were rattled by this week’s subcommittee vote, considered the Republican majority’s first step toward opening the coast to bobbing oil rigs and potential spills. But one member of the Republican leadership--Rep. Chris Cox of Newport Beach--remained staunchly opposed to drilling.

Even if the moratorium loses today, Cox said, it could be saved on some other front, such as in the Senate or with an executive order by President Clinton, who has expressed outrage at the prospect of new drilling.

“As a member of the Republican leadership, I want to assure people that there are so many backstops, so many different ways of winning, that victory is all but guaranteed,” Cox said.