INCLINE VILLAGE, NV — The president signed an executive order outlining the admistration’s plans for the Lake Tahoe Basin directing various federal agencies to join in a “partnership” — a super-agency called the Tahoe Federal Interagency Partnership — that is to become immersed in the affairs of the local governments.
The signing took place at the long-anticipated Presidential Forum, held in the Hyatt Regency Hotel on the lakeshore of this upscale community. Also, $56 million in federal funds over the next two years were promised for various environmental efforts in the area — like controlled burns for forest maintenance, research projects and data collection.
“The president is going to honor the spirit of this place, the soul of this place,” said Katie McGinty of the Office of Environmental Quality in a press briefing.
For weeks rumors had been circulating about what the president planned for the basin. For environmentalists, visions of hundreds of millions of federal dollars for pie-in-the-sky conservation projects danced in their heads. Property rights advocates and their allies feared a repeat of the land grab tactic employed during the 1996 campaign when Clinton outlawed goldmining outside of Yellowstone National Park and declared 1.7 million acres in southern Utah to be a national monument off limits for much of anything except hiking. There were also concerns — not without basis — that Clinton intended to declare the area a United Nations biosphere reserve.
“When President Clinton visits national parks in the western United States, people tend to lose their property rights, counties lose tax revenue and the country loses natural resources. … One can only wonder what he has in store for Nevada and California,” wrote D. Dowd Muska of the Reno-based Nevada Policy Reseach Institute in a recent Nevada Journal article.
We need wonder no more — eventually that which Muska predicted will happen, though at first glance the executive order seems rather benign, and it would be easy to dismiss the Tahoe Summit that spawned it as nothing more than a dog-and-pony show to provide a theater for some political posturing. After all, $56 million is a pittance compared to the $900 million expected. California Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler, a Wilson appointee, said he was “profoundly disapponted.” in the amount.
“We’ll have to rethink our commitment, given the failure of the feds to step up to the plate,” he said.
The order on closer inspection is anything but benign, though the area is not being turned over to the United Nations. However, the federal government is coming on strong. The partnership of agencies is to coordinate federal programs and projects, and will include the secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, the Army, Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
But McGinty made clear in her remarks that the new partnership of agencies is not simply a directive for “his agencies to work better among themselves.” “We’re making a commitment that we [the federal government] are going to be here in full partnership.”
That is, the federal government is coming in and essentially taking over the management of the governments of the Tahoe Basin.
The order permits any [federal] agency action deemed “essential for the protection of public health or safety, national security … or for the maintenance or rehabilitation of environmental quality within the region.”
“Nothing in this order is intended to create … any right to administrative or judicial review … or any other right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable by a party against the United States, its agencies or instrumentalitis, its officers or employees, or any other person.”
Stripped of bureaucratise, those few lines say that whatever one of the partnership agencies wants to do, it can do. No redress in the courts will be permitted — not even by the local governments who might object to future directives. For a few million dollars the federal government has bought itself an awful lot of power.
