Anchorage Daily News

FAIRBANKS -- A federal agency is delaying a decision on a controversial land swap within the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge to allow more time for land appraisals to be completed.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has delayed for as much as one year its decision on the swap between the federal government and Doyon Ltd.

Doyon, a Fairbanks-based Native corporation, is the largest private landowner in Alaska.

The agency planned to announce its decision later this fall but Larry Bell, assistant regional director for external affairs, said the agency is now shooting for the fall of 2009 as a target date.

The appraisals are needed to ensure that the swap is an "equal value exchange," Bell said.

In the swap, the Fish and Wildlife Service would get at least 150,000 acres of Doyon land within the refuge, and Doyon would give up another 56,500 acres of land it owns inside the refuge that was selected as part of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1970.

Doyon would get 110,000 acres of refuge lands believed to be rich in oil and gas reserves with subsurface drilling rights to another 97,000 acres of adjacent land. The Native corporation would also get to select lands outside the refuge in exchange for the ANCSA-selected lands it gives up in the refuge.

Doyon and refuge officials have been negotiating a deal for the past six years.

The swap is opposed by environmentalists and many residents in Yukon Flats villages, who fear development in the refuge and the effects it will have on hunting, fishing and wildlife habitat.

"It's a major coup for us in the villages to have it put off for another year," Dacho Alexander, first chief of the Gwichyaa Zhee Gwich'in tribe in Fort Yukon, said on Friday, a day after the delay was announced. "It kind of gives us breathing room we've been asking for to study the possible implications of drilling in the flats.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a draft environmental impact statement for the proposed swap in January and received more than 100,000 public comments, of which more than 80 percent opposed the exchange.

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