The busy life of the Secretary of the Interior

Posted 7/26/17

Ryan Zinke, President Donald Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior, is a busy guy. In April, Trump ordered a Department of the Interior (DOI) review of all 117 national monuments. Some of the …

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The busy life of the Secretary of the Interior

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Ryan Zinke, President Donald Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior, is a busy guy. In April, Trump ordered a Department of the Interior (DOI) review of all 117 national monuments. Some of the monuments were relatively easy to review. But one, Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, was a bit more complicated than others, because it’s at the center of a debate about whether it’s appropriate for the federal government to protect certain lands and preserve them for future generations.

Anyway, the Bears Ear question gained a bit of attention, so Zinke personally ventured out to the monument, and, according to a DOI press release, “spent several days on the ground in Utah touring the monument by air, car, foot, and horseback, speaking with stakeholders from Tribal, local, state and federal government…” before issuing a report. Environmental groups and Native American tribes wanted the entire monument of about 1.35 million acres to be protected, while local business people want to shrink it. Zinke’s recommendation to the president is that the size of Bears Ears be reduced, but he hasn’t yet said by how much.

Zinke is also the guy who must decide how many acres of off-shore land will be leased for oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. He decided that 75.9 million acres would be about right, and he announced the sale of the leases would take place on August 16. DOI said the lease sale “would include all available unleased areas in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico and provide a reduced royalty rate for shallow water leases to encourage exploration and production under current market conditions.”

Then there are personnel matters to attend to. The guy who used to be the director of DOI’s Office of Policy Analysis, where he was able to study the impacts of climate change in Alaska, was reassigned. Joel Clement is now responsible for collecting royalty payments from businesses that make money drilling for fossil fuels on federal land.

He has filed a whistle-blower complaint against the Trump Administration. He wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “I believe I was retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.”

But Zinke’s job is not all business, conflict or darkness. Given his position at the top of a large federal bureaucracy, he is in a position where, from time to time, he can seem like a generous and loving grandpa.

On July 19, Zinke announced that DOI and the National Park Service are giving $13.3 million to 22 cities to “plan, build, and enhance parks and other outdoor recreation facilities in underserved communities.”

And the quote DOI provided makes him sound like a New York City lefty. “Every kid deserves the opportunity to get outside and play. Whether it’s downtown Detroit or rural Wyoming, investing in public lands is an investment in communities.”

Why does this newspaper care about Zinke’s schedule? Because it is he and his department who recently determined the future of part of our community.

In this community we have an organization called the Upper Delaware Council (UDC). The council has just three employees, but in nearly 30 years of operation the UDC has been an important part of the growth and blossoming of the Upper Delaware Valley.

The council advises municipalities on matters of zoning in the river corridor and compliance with the 1986 Upper Delaware River Management Plan. The council’s board consists of appointees from eight towns in New York and five townships in Pennsylvania, who meet regularly to discuss issues related to the river and the wider community.

Some time ago Zinke ordered a review of all agreements similar to the one between the National Park Service and UDC, and for a while, the flow of funding from Washington was halted. This made for some nervous days at the UDC—especially given the nature of some of Zinke’s other decisions recently—where the executive director determined that if funding had not been restored by September 30, the agency would have had to suspend operations. Fortunately, DOI recently gave the stamp of approval to the agreement between NPS and the UDC, and the UDC now has access to the rest of the federal funding they were expecting for 2017.

A lot of people in this community think the Upper Delaware Wild and Scenic River is every bit as important as the Bears Ears National Monument, and the UDC received a lot of support from groups and individuals who advocated that the funding be restored. The River Reporter would like to thank the Secretary of the Interior and the agency for making the right decision in our case—and hope that a similar sensitivity to the needs of other ecosystems and communities becomes more evident in his future decisions.

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