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Ready for Prime Time?
It
was amateur hour this session when the General
Assembly passed a bill that would encourage oil
and gas drilling off the Virginia coast. Gov.
Warner should veto this bad joke.
As
I write this column, Gov. Mark R. Warner is
deciding the fate of enacted bills sent to him
from the General Assembly.
As he makes these last legislative
decisions of his term, political observers are
assessing his bona fides for higher office.
They
need look no farther than Warner’s veto decision
on SB 1054 to measure his political judgment and
leadership strengths.
This
bill, patroned by Virginia Beach Republicans Sen.
Frank Wagner and Del. “Bob” Purkey, tells the
Governor to use his federal liaison office to
press for an end to the moratorium on offshore
energy drilling. Not only would the Wagner/Purkey
bill make Virginia the first Atlantic Coast state
to oppose the ban, it calls upon Warner to endorse
measures in proposed federal legislation, the
“State Enhanced Authority for Coastal and
Offshore Resources Act” (SEACOR).
The
problem is the SEACOR “legislation” does not
exist.
SEACOR
is a proposal devised by Republican staff members
on the House Resources Committee in Congress to
restart federal oil and gas drilling leases on the
Outer Continental Shelf.
It has circulated in conceptual form in
Washington, D.C., among energy industry lobbyists and others seeking
to end the 22-year moratorium on drilling along
most of the coastline in the lower 48 states.
The
proposal apparently envisions extended state
control over coastal waters, allowing states to
control gas drilling leases up to 40 miles
offshore and oil drilling up to 60 miles, and
giving states a greater share of drilling
royalties. In
return, the drilling moratorium would be lifted
allowing the federal government to issue leases
for oil and gas drilling beyond these “veto
limits”.
“Apparently”
is the operative word since you cannot examine
these proposals yourself:
Requests by the public for copies of the
documents are denied.
No hearings have been held in Congress on
the measures.
Worse
still, no hearings were held in the General
Assembly on the drilling issue during
“consideration” of SB 1054.
The Wagner/Purkey bill was drafted to avoid
the committees with expertise on energy
exploration and the environment.
It went instead to the Senate General Laws
Committee.
In
addition, the pre-filed version of SB 1054, the
one that passed the Senate unanimously in January,
was a bill simply calling upon the federal
government to conduct a survey of offshore gas
resources. It
specifically banned production gas wells off the
coast.
During
a busy House Rules Committee meeting, with 49
other bills on the docket, the patrons inserted a
substitute, endorsing SEACOR and allowing
production gas wells off the coast.
As opponents woke up, some in the House
contested the bill but it passed 54-43.
Back in the Senate, it passed unanimously
again, with most Senators unaware of the changed
nature of the bill.
Upon
learning of the enactment of SB 1054, Virginia
Beach Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf and City Council
member Peter Schmidt (former head of the
Department of Environmental Quality under
then-Gov. Allen) sponsored a resolution asking for
a veto. During the course of the City Council
debate last week, the members of the Virginia
Beach City Council became the first elected
officials in the United States to examine the
provisions of SEACOR in public, albeit without
benefit of actually having the draft federal
“legislation” before them.
Although
the Virginia Beach veto resolution was “deferred
indefinitely,” the debate did reveal additional
information of use to the Governor in making his
veto decision. Under
questioning from Councilman Schmidt about whether
both gas and oil drilling were permitted
under SEACOR (they are), Sen. Wagner said that he
had only read the part dealing with state drilling
royalties, skipping over the details on the
drilling elsewhere in the proposal
Given
these facts, the decision memo for Gov. Warner
on SB 1054 might read as follows:
”This
bill was sent to your desk patroned by a
legislator who didn’t fully understand what he
was proposing in a bill largely unexamined by the
General Assembly. The
legislation intrudes upon the office of the
Governor by mandating that you tell your staff to
tell the State Congressional Delegation to work
for the passage of federal legislation that does
not exist except in a conceptual form that is not
available for public review.
The federal proposal has never had a
hearing held on its merits in Congress or the
General Assembly, and for all we know, was written
by an anonymous congressional staffer on a
cocktail napkin.”
In a March 10, 2005, San Francisco Chronicle
article on this issue, a spokesman for the House
Resources Committee said of SEACOR that it was not
yet even a formal proposal but "one of a
number of policy concepts that originated in the
House Resources Committee.”
“It's not ready for prime time," he said.
The same can be said for Sen. Wagner and all but 43
members of the General Assembly after their
performance on SB 1054.
The only remaining question, to be answered this
week with the Governor’s decision on SB 1054 -
“Is Mark Warner ready for prime time?”
--
January 17, 2005
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