Interior Secretary Gale Norton has
announced that 70 percent of full-time National Park
Service jobs may be farmed out to the private sector — up
from the 10 percent predicted last year (HCN, 12/9/02: The push is
on to privatize federal jobs). The Interior Department paid
CH2MHill, a private company, $5 million to design a
“Competitive Sourcing” plan that calls for replacing
11,000 permanent federal employees, including biologists and
archaeologists, with private contractors.
The
northern pike in California’s Lake Davis are
proving strangely resilient. Three years ago, the state’s
Department of Fish and Game began killing the invasive predator
fish to protect downstream trout fisheries. But the pike’s
numbers have continued to increase: In 2000, the agency killed 600
fish, then in 2001, about 6,000 (HCN, 12/17/01: Pesky pike
persist). And in 2002, the agency killed almost 18,000 pike —
most of them less than a year old.
In August,
when a drunk driver in New Mexico hit a truck carrying
radioactive waste to Carlsbad’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project
(WIPP), the Energy Department assured the public that radioactivity
had not been released (HCN, 9/30/02: Nuclear waste road accidents
don’t faze WIPP). But when the double-containers were unloaded,
WIPP workers found that radioactivity had, in fact, leaked through
the inner lining of one of them, although the outer steel
containment held. Unable to accept the tainted cargo, they sent it
back to Idaho, where it originated — and where it remains
unopened.
Washington state officials have
expressed “grave concerns” about plans by the
federal government to reclassify the radioactive substance
technetium (HCN, 11/11/02: Feds find shortcuts in nuclear cleanup).
By downgrading technetium to a less dangerous classification, the
Energy Department can cut costs on cleanup methods at Hanford
Nuclear Reservation. Seven years ago, a plume of technetium was
found in the groundwater below Hanford, creeping toward the
Columbia River (HCN, 9/1/97: Radioactive waste from Hanford is
seeping toward the Columbia).
A plan to protect
forests near Snoqualmie Pass just bit the dust. When
Weyerhaeuser announced that the 104,000 acre Snoqualmie Tree Farm
was up for sale, the Evergreen Forest Trust made an offer to buy
the land and protect it from development, while still keeping it
open to commercial logging (HCN, 5/13/02: Landmark timber deal
stops Seattle sprawl). To pay the $185 million price tag, the group
proposed to sell tax-exempt bonds to investors, then pay off the
debt through timber sales. But last session, Congress failed to
approve the trust’s use of bonds, and the one-year sales
agreement expired on January 16.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Latest Bounce.
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