Offshore Oil Drilling Opposed Nw Lawmakers Optimistic Despite Subcommittee Vote

Northwest lawmakers say they are optimistic Congress will maintain a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling despite a House panel’s vote Tuesday to lift a 13-year-old moratorium.

“There is such public objection to it that there’s little chance it would be successful,” Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., said about the proposal to lift the ban.

On a 7-6 vote, the House Appropriations subcommittee on the interior defeated an amendment by Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., that would have extended for another year the ban on drilling along most of the U.S. outer continental shelf.

Freshmen Reps. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., and Jim Bunn, R-Ore., joined Dicks on the losing side, voting to extend the moratorium.

Gorton will play a significant role in the controversy as chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the interior.

“I do not favor lifting that moratorium,” he told reporters Tuesday.

Even if the ban were lifted, an executive order President Bush issued in 1990 remains in place banning drilling, Gorton said.

Dicks and Bunn said Tuesday they expect the matter to be revisited either on the floor of the House or when the full House Appropriations Committee considers the proposal, which is included in a spending bill for the Interior Department and U.S. Forest Service.

“It was nice to see this is not necessarily going to be a party-line vote, and we probably have a pretty good chance of maintaining the moratorium,” said George Behan, Dicks’ spokesman.

Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is among several House Republicans - including Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, chairman of the subcommittee - who are leading the charge to end the moratorium.

President Clinton said Tuesday the existing moratorium is a “longtime bipartisan consensus on the need to protect the environment and economies of California, Florida, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and other coastal states.

“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.”

No lawmakers in Oregon or Washington have come out publicly in support of opening their coasts to drilling.

Three Oregon Democrats said in a letter to Regula on Monday that the total potential oil and gas reserves off the Oregon and Washington coasts would supply the nation’s oil needs for only two to three days.

“The harm that oil and gas development could do to our fishing and tourist industries far exceeds the potential benefit of a few days’ supply of oil,” Reps. Peter DeFazio, Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Furse wrote.