Montana Political News Roundup Volume 3
U.S. Senator Conrad Burns in a desperate attempt to save his sinking re-election campaign, has revealed that unbeknownst to most Montanans, he is secretly an environmentalist. Senator Burns will attach legislation to the current appropriations bill in the senate permantly prohibiting leasing on 375,000 acres of Forest Service land on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, according to this story http://www.helenair.com/... in the Helena Independent Record.
A deathbed conversion? More below the fold.
The Rocky Mountain Front is a one hundred mile long by ten mile wide stretch of mountainous roadless Forest Service land starting just north of Montana's capital city and running all the way to the south boundary of Glacier National Park. The Front as it is known locally, is home to immense herds of Rocky Mountain Elk, Mule Deer, the largest herd of Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep in the country, and very healthy population of Grizzly Bears, that even wander out onto the Great Plains.
But starting in the late 1950s, exploration for natural gas began on the Front, and in the early 1970s, most of the wild roadless lands were leased for development. Controversy continued for the next two decades and environmentalist fought to void some of the gas leases, buy back others, and allow many to expire. Today, only a handful of leases remain, mostly on the northern Front just south of the Glacier National Park boundary. A ten year moratorium on further leases was instituted by the Lewis and Clark National Forest in the late 1990s after a huge outpouring of public support to protect the Front.
The wild Rocky Mountain Front was left out of the adjacent Bob Marshall Wilderness when it was created in 1940, and has been championed as a critical addition to the Bob for the last fifty years. Montana environmentalists came very close to achieving this goal in 1988 when congress passed the 1.5 million acre Montana Wilderness Bill, which included most of the Front as wilderness.
But something happened in the late Fall of 1988. President Ronald Reagan pocket vetoed the Montana Wilderness Bill, the only time in our nation's history that a wilderness bill has been vetoed by a chief executive of either party.
Why did Reagan veto wilderness protection for the Rocky Mountain Front? Reagan vetoed the bill on the request of then Senator Rudy Boschwitz (R-MN), head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee on behalf of a little known radio personality, Conrad Burns, who was running against Senator John Melcher, who had sponsored protection for the Front.
This audacious veto is widely believed to have put Burns over the top, and Conrad went on to defeat Senator Melcher by only 15,000 votes, 52% to 48%, to become only the second republican senator in the state's history.
As recently as 2002, Burns opposed stopping natural gas exploration on the Front. But Burn's new legislation is only a tiny step in protecting the area, and the prohibition on leasing can be repealed by congress at any time. None of the handful of existing lease would be purchased by federal dollars. Instead, Senator Burns is encouraging private parties to buy the lease and retire them themselves.
Since the June 6th primary, the Burns campaign has been in panic mode, launching little initiatives by press release nearly every day in the Montana press. This is yet another desperate attempt to halt the free fall of Burn's approval rating with Montana voters.
