Last September, when President Clinton wanted to turn 1.8 million acres of Southern Utah into a national monument, he ignored the vociferous complaints of residents of the area and their elected representatives and created the Escalante National Monument by executive order.
Bypassing the legislative process worked then, so he’s about to try it again — this time with the American Heritage Rivers Initiative, a program Clinton first mentioned in his State of the Union address in February.
“I will designate 10 American Heritage Rivers to help communities along side them revitalize their waterfronts and clean up pollution in the rivers,” he said. The designated rivers will be recipients of federal support in the form of grants, increased services, and greater access to federal programs. The Hudson, the Columbia, the Colorado, and the entire Mississippi, from its headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico, are expected to be on the list which will be announced later this summer. There’s nothing to prevent the president from adding additional rivers in the future.
What Clinton didn’t say was that in the final days of last year’s session, Congress had rejected the American Heritage Areas Act. That bill would have authorized Congress to designate vast stretches of the country as heritage zones based on historical, cultural or natural characteristics. A number of river systems were included as targets for designation. Grass-roots activists, who perceived this bill as a threat to property rights and a major step towards national land-use planning, were able to muster sufficient opposition.
The Heritage Rivers Initiative is a scaled-down version of the Heritage Areas Act, but unlike its predecessor originates as a program within the Executive Branch and will depend on the whims and agenda of the president. Congressional approval and oversight are not required. Clinton is writing Congress completely out of the picture, and essentially removing his actions from public scrutiny and accountability.
He is also hamstringing potential opposition of the kind that has prevented designations to date. For several years environmental groups and other promoters of the heritage area concept have been pushing to have the Mississippi so designated — and not just the river, but every county that borders it on each side. Local activists have thus far been able to block that takeover, but Clinton could undo their efforts with a pen stroke by designating the river by proclamation — which it appears he’ll do.
To ensure that no significant opposition will have time to develop to derail the initiative itself, the rules for nominating rivers for designation were published in the Federal Register May 21, with a comment period to end June 9 — barely 3 weeks.
The actual guidelines of the initiative are being drafted by a dozen agencies: the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Interior, Justice, and Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council for Environmental Quality.
The completed program will feature an interagency taskforce to oversee and coordinate programs from Washington, with teams of agency planners and technical experts dispatched to river communities to assure federally approved implementation and compliance. Each designated river will be assigned a “River Navigator,” a bureaucrat who’ll “help implement the community’s vision and provide a single contact for all federal resources.”
Assurances abound that participation is to be voluntary, that designation will be community-based and “there will be no new regulatory requirements either for individuals are state and local governments.” But objections raised against last session’s Heritage Areas Act are being raised again.
“This initiative has the same problems,” said R.J. Smith of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute. “It’s safe to say that this is a move towards national land-use control. It brings a federal nexus to a non-federal area and federal control down onto private land. Once the boundaries of an area are drawn — let’s say 20 miles wide each side of a river, whatever the mandates are for that area — they’ll apply to everyone in it in some way.”
Smith dismissed assurances that designations would be community-based and have the support of the local people.
“Are they really asking small farmers, ranchers, and small property owners how they like the idea?” he asked. “No, they asking the same people who are always involved in programs like this — the president of the local chamber of commerce, the wealthy and influential, the bankers, and of course all the environmental groups. It it were really a community effort, you wouldn’t need 14 federal agencies involved in it.”
