The Quincy Library Group Bill is tangled in holiday
traffic, after flying through the U.S. House of Representatives
last July (HCN, 9/29/97). Sens. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark., and Patrick
Leahy, D-Vt., put holds on the bill, stalling it in the Senate. But
proponents like Sen Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., are confident it
will move quickly when Congress convenes in
January.
The country’s largest Indian tribe, the
Navajo Nation, has again said no to gambling on the reservation.
Voters rejected a gambling referendum last month by an eight-point
margin: 54 percent against and 46 percent in favor. That’s two
points less than the 1994 vote (HCN, 5/1/96).
The
University of Arizona wants to put a controversial third telescope
atop Mount Graham (HCN, 7/24/95) near Tucson, but it won’t get
federal money to help. On Nov. 2, President Clinton vetoed
congressional funding for the telescope, part of a $10 million
package for the university’s astronomy department.
House Democrat Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., has
introduced a bill to cancel the three-year federal Recreational Fee
Demonstration Program (HCN, 10/13/97), which raises money for
maintenance of visitor facilities on federal lands. “It’s
outrageous,” he says, to charge “taxpaying citizens a fee to take a
hike on a forest trail.” He proposes to raise money by taking a 5
percent royalty on minerals mined on federal land.
New Mexico’s Rio Arriba County and local
landowners have temporily settled a dispute over logging private
land on a local watershed (HCN, 10/27/97). The compromise allows
moderate logging with environmental restrictions until a Santa Fe
district judge decides whether the county can issue logging
permits.
Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, a Democrat, has
shed his neutrality on the southwest Colorado Animas-La Plata water
project (HCN, 11/11/96). “Build it,” he told Ute tribal leaders
Nov. 18 in support of a scaled-down version of the project favored
by the tribes. Hurdles remain. The Environmental Protection Agency
has challenged the final environmental impact statement on the
overall Animas-La Plata project, saying the study does not examine
all alternatives. Romer’s solution: that the agency accept Lt. Gov.
Gail Schoettler’s analysis of 65 alternatives and support “A-LP
Lite.”
*Peter
Chilson
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Wayward West.
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