Nuke dump oversight funds OK’d by lawmakers

Saturday, Sept. 26, 1998 | 2:42 a.m.

House and Senate negotiators agreed this week to earmark $250,000 for the state and $5.5 million for counties surrounding Yucca Mountain to monitor the government's work.

"The money for Nevada was one of three issues that was holding this (energy and water) spending bill up, and we feel fortunate to have gotten this much," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., one of the Senate negotiators on the conference committee.

President Clinton's budget had sought $4.9 million for Nevada oversight.

Although Congress slashed that figure, it approved the president's request for $5.5 million for local counties. This will be the second consecutive year of oversight funding for counties, which received $5 million last year.

But in another development on Friday, a House chairman sent a letter to Gov. Bob Miller asking him to provide proof by Oct. 23 that the state has not misspent federal oversight funds.

The letter, from Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, chairman of the House Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations, probably will not affect the new allocation of money to Nevada. But it raises new questions about expenditures of the Nevada Office of Nuclear Projects.

Earlier this year, a Department of Energy audit concluded that the Nevada agency misspent almost $700,000 in federal taxpayer money, using it primarily to drum up opposition to the Yucca Mountain project, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, instead of monitoring it.

On Sept. 9, the department notified the Nevada agency's executive director, Bob Loux, that it will take $691,835 - the amount claimed to have been misspent - from the agency's budget and reallocate it.

"We have our attorney general (Frankie Sue Del Papa) preparing a brief because we are considering a lawsuit against the department," Loux said Friday. "We think the audit and the reallocation were unlawful."

Miller spokesman Gordon Absher said the governor received the letter Friday, and will review it carefully. "He hasn't decided how he will respond," Absher said.