Native corporation lobbies against ANWR monument idea

by The Associated Press

The chairman of Eskimo-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corp. says making Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into a national monument would amount to taking away the corporation’s development rights within the refuge coastal plain.

Oliver Leavitt said Sept. 6 that the regional Native corporation will file a lawsuit for damages if President Clinton heeds the call of environmentalists and former President Carter by further protecting the refuge as a monument.

“The only thing that is our economy up there is the oil,” Leavitt told the Anchorage Daily News.

His comments underscore the continuing turmoil caused when Carter voiced his support for a monument protecting the refuge’s 1.5 million-acre coastal plain from oil exploration and development.

Gov. Tony Knowles immediately scolded Carter, a fellow Democrat, for urging a lands designation that he contends would be illegal under the Alaska lands act Carter signed into law in 1980.

“The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act contains the ‘no more’ clause, requiring Congress alone to enact any future land withdrawals of more than 5,000 acres in Alaska,” Knowles wrote.

Leavitt said the corporation views its refuge holdings as the key to its economic future. While a monument cannot include private lands, it can surround them and Leavitt said Arctic Slope is concerned that a Clinton monument designation will do just that.

In that case, Leavitt said, even if Congress were inclined to open its land to drilling, the monument designation would deny the corporation access for equipment and pipelines.

“We’d certainly take the position that that’s a taking of our property rights,” Leavitt said.