Editorial: Will he be there when it matters?

Saturday, Feb. 24, 2001 | 10:42 a.m.

Sen. John Ensign is happy that there is a new sheriff in town. The freshman Republican senator said last week that a new presidential administration, with a different approach on federal land management, has produced a compromise settlement to solve a nasty, two-year standoff over Elko County's efforts to rebuild a washed-out Forest Service road.

The Associated Press reported that Ensign said Bush and Interior Secretary Gale Norton "will give a little more Western perspective to these issues. Even though Bruce Babbitt was a Westerner, he didn't reflect the West's thinking on things. One of the first things you ask is, 'Do you work with the local people or do you take command and control of the situation without working with the people?' "

Despite Ensign's criticisms, Babbitt did gather local input before making important decisions. No one would argue with Ensign's belief that the federal government should work with local residents -- it's a view as American as apple pie. The fact of the matter is that, for the most part, Westerners supported the Clinton administration's federal land-use policies that were designed to protect the environment. The dispute really was with the timber, gas and mining industries, which believed that the Clinton administration's regulations would cut into their profits.

For that matter, it will be interesting to see if Ensign's view that the new administration believes in local control actually imbues itself with Bush on a monumentally more important matter to this state: Nevada's efforts to fend off the federal government's plans to send 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, which is just 90 miles from Las Vegas. The dispute in Elko County over a little-used, washed-out stretch of a road on Forest Service land is chump change compared to the push by the nuclear power industry and the Republican-controlled Congress to send man's deadliest waste here.

Bush and his influential Republican supporters assured Nevadans during the campaign that the GOP presidential nominee shared the state's concerns on nuclear waste. Now it is time for Bush to deliver on these promises, and improve on President Clinton's already strong record in this area, staving off this dangerous bid to place nuclear waste here. It is hoped that Bush not only protects this small state from the federal government's oppressive actions on Yucca Mountain, but that he also ignores the bidding of the nuclear power industry, a big contributor to his presidential campaign.