Gerald Ford's Strip Mining Numbers Game
NORDLINGER, STEPHEN
Washington-USA GERALD FORD'S STRIP MINING NUMBERS GAME BY STEPHEN NORDLINGER Washington Although the conclusions of a Presidential veto message are always open to dispute, the basic factual...
...Agents in the field were directed to gather more information, and calls went out to experts who had not previously been contacted...
...As June 3, the day of the Udall session, approached, the Administration apparently began to get nervous about the figures contained in the Ford statement...
...To begin with, I found that many of the mines Administration witnesses said would be forced to shut down according to their survey do not even exist at present...
...Two spokesmen described it as explicitly banning strip mining on steep slopes of 20 degrees or greater when, in fact, a specific prohibition was deliberately omitted by the House and Senate on roll-call votes...
...In many cases the intricacies of the legislation were hastily explained on the phone, and an instant interpretation was asked for...
...no written responses were requested...
...What I have discovered is that the White House's statistical procedures on the strip mining bill add up to a classic demonstration of the way the Federal bureaucracy can be utilized to buttress a preconceived conclusion...
...Still, none of the questions that can be raised about President Ford's veto message are likely to change matters as they now stand, and the defeat of the strip mining bill may have signaled the final collapse of a four-year effort to bring some kind of Federal regulation to a hodge-podge of often inadequate state controls...
...Finally, supposedly to verify their figures, Washington officials conducted an informal poll of mining associations, state agencies and mine owners...
...How sound were the figures at the top...
...In addition, the White House directed the Bureau of Mines to assume that all strip mining substantially affecting alluvial valley floors in the West, where massive amounts of coal can be recovered, would close under the terms of the legislation...
...Despite repeated requests, neither the FEA nor the Interior Department has provided me with any rational basis for these estimates...
...This frightened some congressmen, helping to scuttle the most important environmental measure of recent years: On June 10, the House failed to override the President's veto by three votes...
...Yet the average price of coal has doubled in the last 18 months due to high demand, increasing the possibility that marginal operations could stay in business...
...for instance, Democratic Representative Mario Biaggi of the Bronx was reported to have voted to sustain the veto in return for a pledge from a Southern Democratic official with an interest in strip mining that he would back New York as the site for the 1976 Democratic convention...
...declared: "The President has fallen victim to the vague estimates of production losses submitted to him by the Federal Energy Administration...
...Where the production figures were unable to sway House members, traditional wheeling and dealing often did the trick...
...Yet the figures President Ford offered as a rationale for his veto last May 20 of a bill to control strip mining were carelessly compiled and, it seems fair to say after some first-hand probing, consciously exaggerated...
...He told me that an FEA staffer visited his office and discussed the legislation in the course of a "general type of conversation...
...Among the state officials reached was John Roberts, chief of the Division of Reclamation in Kentucky, the largest coal-producing state in Appalachia...
...And Representative Morris Udall (D.-Ariz...
...Meanwhile, the scheduled confrontation triggered some heated efforts within the government to come up with additional evidence...
...No formal questionaire was submitted to his agency for information...
...No fixed set of questions was used...
...Before the veto, engineers and officials at the Bureau of Mines and the FEA were instructed to calculate production losses if the strip mining bill became law, without being told to consider possible accommodations to it-an approach that in itself carried a built-in bias...
...Interestingly, while he said he opposed regulation, in a private report to association members last October, Lusk said he thought West Virginia miners could "adjust properly" to a bill then pending that was stronger than this year's proposal...
...The estimates varied from 40 million-162 million tons within two years, but Administration spokesmen chose to emphasize the loss at the extreme upper end...
...Apparently even people at the FEA and the Bureau of Mines were not entirely conversant with the provisions of the bill...
...In a way, the vagueness of the Roberts interview is not surprising...
...It kept dodging and delaying when it was asked to supply material in advance of the hearing...
...Ben Lusk, president of the West Virginia Surface Mining and Reclamation Association, was listed as one of those whose opinion was solicited, but be told me nobody from Washington ever got in touch with him...
...For in a period when the primary concern on Capitol Hill is fuel supplies and prices, strip mining reform may well be a cause whose time has come and gone...
...Not only was this sample a limited one, but the FEA refused to disclose the names of the mines for what it said were proprietary reasons...
...The production losses thus estimated accounted for a major portion of the President's calculations, but no study was made to determine what the situation would be if those mines managed to adjust their operations to the bill's requirements...
...All of which leads one to wonder how such officials could have explained the measure to others over long-distance lines...
...All in all, the exercise showed the limited powers of even a strong Congressional majority in favor of a particular piece of legislation when faced with vigorous lobbying -in this case by coal operators and utilities-and a resourceful Chief Executive who needs only a third of either house of Congress to have his way...
...Efforts to discourage union support of the legislation, incidentally, did not succeed...
...Senator Henry Jackson (D.-Wash...
...Washington-USA GERALD FORD'S STRIP MINING NUMBERS GAME BY STEPHEN NORDLINGER Washington Although the conclusions of a Presidential veto message are always open to dispute, the basic factual evidence -the statistics and other data that the reasoning rests upon-should, like Caesar's wife, be above suspicion...
...Members of Congress, as a result, never did find out how Ford had put his data together...
...At about this time, however, 1 began my own investigation...
...called a special hearing to question Administration officials about the accuracy of the veto message...
...No less revealing than the Administration's analytical methods were the people it chose to contact...
...Unfortunately, as so often happens on Capitol Hill, the Udall inquiry degenerated into a contest between the Democrats and the White House, a downward course that was accelerated when the Arizonan began using the forum to draw attention to his Presidential candidacy...
...Nothing, though, was delivered...
...Part of the predicted drop in output, it developed, was based on the number of enterprises the government thought might open by 1977 if no regulatory bill were passed...
...Stephen Nordlinger is a Washington reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...This in spite of the fact that several prominent Senators and Representatives started challenging Ford on his numbers the day he announced them...
...So did lobbyists for the coal and utility industries, who were campaigning intensely to defeat the measure...
...After talking with the engineers and agency representatives, I can only conclude that the Ford predictions had little, if any, substance to them...
...A chart submitted to the Udall hearing showed that the tonnage losses given for small mines were based on projections from "approximately five operating mines...
...Similarly, the Administration assumed that practically all small mines would cease functioning because of the proposed law...
...no investigation of their financial ability to comply with the new regulations was ever undertaken...
...the UMWA endorsed the measure...
...The Administration warned that acceptance of the bill would reduce coal production as much as 162 million tons by 1977 and put up to 36,000 men out of work...
...One person called was B.V Cooper, executive director of the Virginia Surface Mining and Reclamation Association, who had organized a caravan of mine operators to demonstrate against the bill in front of the White House last April 9. Another was Kennus Bowling of the Interstate Mining Compact Commission, which voted 5-2 in May 1974 against strip mining controls...
...A third, William Kelce of the Alabama Mineral Producers Association, had been selected by the coal industry to present its views against the bill before the International Executive Board of the United Mine Workers of America...
Vol. 58 • August 1975 • No. 16
