It is easy to shrug off the notion of federal "overreach" -- dismissing it as rhetoric or political mumbo-jumbo -- until you get a peek inside a federal agency hell-bent on getting its way, no matter the law, that uses any and every possible means to tilt the playing field.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency, it turns out, is just such an agency. It is waging a relentless, precedent-setting campaign to preemptively veto development of the Pebble project in the Bristol Bay region -- using junk science, secrecy and authority it does not have -- even before the first development plan sees daylight.
If the EPA succeeds, the economic consequences for Alaska and the nation could be enormous. The Partnership?s estimates have the gold and copper mine creating 15,000 jobs, contributing $64 billion to the gross domestic product and generating about $18 billion in federal, state and local tax revenues. It would mean at least 1,000 Alaska jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in state revenues.
A federal judge a few days ago granted a preliminary injunction halting the EPA?s efforts to preemptively veto the project after the Pebble Partnership sued, claiming the agency violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, an open-government statute enacted 42 years ago. It aimed to curb special interests? closed-door influence over government agencies -- and ensure openness and fairness.
The EPA, the Partnership claims, secretly established and used three de facto advisory committees. It stacked them with anti-mining, fisheries and environmental interests to develop -- in secret -- its strategy to oppose the mine and preemptively block it under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act.
The Partnership describes the three de facto panels in court documents as the Anti-Mine Coalition committee, the Anti-Mine Scientists committee and the Anti-Mine Assessment Team panel. The EPA coordinated, consulted and colluded with all three, the partnership claims in court documents.
Heavily redacted, incomplete Freedom of Information Act responses show the Anti-Mine Coalition committee included environmental groups, anti-mine activists, lawyers, lobbyists and Alaska Native tribal representatives. They started coordinating as early as 2009, the Partnership says, and functioned as an auxiliary EPA.
The committee even "coordinated resources on the ground in Alaska and in Washington, D.C., to provide EPA with the public and political support needed ... in a way that would limit public involvement to the greatest degree possible," the Partnership claims. And none of it complied with FACA.
The committee included Geoffrey Parker, lawyer for a half-dozen of the anti-mine Alaska Native tribes and billionaire Robert Gillam, who funded the committee, the Partnership said in its court filing. It included Trout Unlimited, the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association; Rick Halford, anti-mine activist, former state legislator and a co-chair of Gov. Bill Walker?s transition team; the Center for Science in Public Participation; Wayne Nastri, former EPA official turned lobbyist; representatives of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation; the Nature Conservancy; and the National Wildlife Federation, among others.
The EPA, the Partnership says, established the Anti-Mine Scientists committee for analysis, study design, data and drafting help with its 404(c) strategy, the Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment and responses to peer reviewers? criticisms. It functioned as the EPA "science arm."
The Anti-Mine Assessment Team committee included members of the EPA Bristol Bay Assessment Team. It helped develop and draft the Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment -- largely a sham built on a fantasy mining scenario and used by the agency to declare such a mine would destroy the Bristol Bay fishery.
There is no way a rational person could call the rigged advisory committees "fair" or "balanced." Alaskans should be outraged by this federal intrusion.
Everything the EPA has done concerning Pebble -- from day one -- is questionable, if not an outright lie, beginning with its story about how and when it got involved. The agency claims it was mid-2010 when Natives petitioned the agency, but its own documents show it was considering preemption an option much earlier; the idea may have come from inside the agency as early as 2008.
Whether you like the idea of the project or hate it, allowing a federal agency, any federal agency, to decide it will ignore laws is a dangerous precedent. Pebble?s history illustrates how abusive federal authority can be when wielded by bureaucrats with a political agenda.
Truly, Pebble is the poster child for federal overreach.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communications.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com