It doesn’t rise to the level of the sex and drugs peccadillo or oil shale lease fire sale but Interior staffers stepped in ethical cow pie again.
An Oct. report by the Dept. of Interior Inspector General found in the waning days of the Bush Administration that two high level National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS) managers breached ethical protocols with environmental advocacy groups the National Wildlife Federation and the Wilderness Society, including discussing proprietary budget information, requesting changes to federal legislation under consideration and providing editing assistance on non-governmental brochures.
NLCS, a division of the embattled Bureau of Land Management, is charged with conserving and protecting 27 million acres of nationally significant public lands, largely in the West.
Its Division Chief Jeff Jarvis copped to a fellow co-worker that his actions were “felony stupidity.”
That’s putting it mildly.
But Jarvis is largely off the hook. NLCS Director Elana Daly, who was also investigated, has since left the department.
The Dept. of Justice weighed in on the investigation and concluded that there were no criminal sanctions for the lobbying violation. Any administrative action is at the discretion of the BLM director.
The investigation was spurred by 2008 complaints by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and now former Rep. Bill Sali (R-Idaho), who lost his re-election bid. Both Bishop and Sali have been noisy foes of Interior and the agency’s attempts to strengthen oil and gas industry regulations on public lands. Bishop chairs the Western Caucus, a conservative congressional group that champions property rights and unfettered energy development.
High Country News narrates the latest installment of rogue Interior staffers gone wild:
But the enviro-agency dalliances highlighted by the investigation look downright G-rated compared to the Interior Department’s cavorting with industry. Last year, the Inspector General found that staffers of Interior’s Mineral Management Service were literally in bed with executives from the oil companies they were supposed to be auditing. That is, when their bosses weren’t demanding oral sex from them, or sniffing meth off their toaster ovens. Soap operatics aside, though, that investigation highlighted just how dysfunctional the program overseen by these party animals really was. Royalty in Kind — wherein royalties on oil and gas plucked from public land are paid in oil and gas — was first implemented because it could net more money for the feds than traditional royalties. But the Inspector General found that it was more vulnerable to faulty oversight than the conventional system of collecting cash royalties.
In response, now-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar performed one of his most significant acts yet: On Sept. 16, he began phasing out the Royalty In Kind program.
Salazar didn’t stop there. On Oct. 20, he ordered an investigation into “a set of favorable conditions and low royalty rates” offered to energy companies holding oil shale leases just days before the end of the Bush administration. That announcement came just about a month after news broke that the Justice Department was investigating whether former Interior Secretary Gale Norton’s department gave preferential treatment to Royal Dutch Shell. In 2006, Interior awarded oil shale leases to a subsidiary of the company. Just two months later, Norton resigned from her position at Interior and soon after took a position in Shell’s oil shale department.
High Country News also notes, with irony, that Interior Sec. Ken Salazar announced Sept. 21 a little-noticed management order to shore up the department’s ethics program.
