Bush picks utah gov. leavitt to head EPA

[Superbelt]

Bush picks Utah Gov. Leavitt to head EPA
By John Heilprin

Aug. 11, 2003 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush has picked Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, an advocate of shifting environmental regulation to the states, to become head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a senior administration official said Monday.

Leavitt, a three-term Republican governor, would succeed Christie Whitman, a former New Jersey governor who held the post of EPA administrator for the first 2 1/2 years of the administration before resigning in May.

The EPA post has been a lightning rod for critics of the administration's environmental policies. Bush, on a Western trip to talk about timber policies and wildfires, was expected to announce Leavitt's nomination late Monday.

Leavitt, 52, has championed the idea of increasing environmental cooperation among federal, state and local officials.

Over the objections of environmentalists, he advocated a major highway extension through wetlands near the Great Salt Lake. The 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals halted the project, saying the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not pay enough attention to wildlife or look at alternatives before approving it.

As governor, Leavitt has made several environmental arrangements with the Bush administration, most recently settling a long-standing dispute over ownership of roads across federal land. He has also negotiated several exchanges of state and federal land, some of them questioned by Interior Department auditors.

Administration officials described Leavitt, the nation's longest serving governor, as a leader on environmental issues with a record of improving air and water and conserving land. He has been co-chair of the Western Regional Air Partnership, and officials said he was instrumental in bringing together states, tribes, environmentalists and industry to address the problem of brown haze over the Grand Canyon.

Leavitt also oversaw his state's preparations for and hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and since then has served on a presidentially appointed advisory committee on homeland security.

As Utah's governor, he has fought against plans to build a temporary storage facility for high-level nuclear waste on an Indian reservation in western Utah. The state is also home to a biological test site, a chemical weapons incinerator, a low-level nuclear waste dump and a company that is one of the nation's largest air polluters.

In 1995, Leavitt called a growth summit to deal with Utah's booming population and economy. The meeting resulted in calls for local-based, free-market approaches to preserving open space, but yielded few tangible changes.

Whitman, who had a record as an environmental moderate when she was New Jersey's governor, clashed several times with officials in Bush's White House and other agencies. Her views often lost out to concerns raised by developers and energy companies.

Bush, for example, reversed his campaign position in favor of regulating carbon dioxide from burning coal and oil as a pollutant. Whitman had stated the administration's position would be in favor of placing a ceiling on CO2 emissions. Against her advice, Bush also rejected an international treaty on global warming negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 by the Clinton administration.

Leavitt had met with administration officials in early June to discuss the possibility of taking the post, but he declined then, saying it would be "highly problematic" because he was considering running for a fourth term, a spokeswoman said at the time.

Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, a former Republican senator, also had been mentioned as a candidate for the EPA post. Kempthorne confirmed earlier this month that he had talked with White House officials about the job shortly after Whitman's resignation.

http://salon.com/news/wire/2003/08/...head/index.html

This appointment proves with certainty that George W. Bush cares nothing about the environment.

Utah was working very hard to keep whirling disease out of its streams and rivers (it's a fatal disease that attacks fish and once it gets into a river system it simply devastates the fish population), and there were many rules and regs about the release of farm-raised fish in the rivers. Well, someone broke the rules and introduced the disease to Utah's rivers, an environmental and economic disaster. The state fish and wildlife department launched an investigation, the evidence began to strongly point toward a fish farm owned by Mike Leavitt's brother, and Mike Leavitt shut down the investigation with absolutely no reason given. The chutzpah and corruption was breathtaking, but in the peculiarly submissive political climate of Utah, he just skated on.

The whirling disease link is horrendous. This is the kind of issue that should peel off the traditional hunter/fisherman outdoorsmen from Bush's support. That is if they want to be able to continue to fish and hunt in this country. It takes balls the size of satellites to nominate a man like Leavitt to head up the EPA.

When he sold Utahans on the sound bite slogans of "Do The Bright Thing" and "Slow The Flow" he arranged to sell power and water out of the state even during power shortages and droughts. He allowed access to public lands to ranchers and developers illegally and pseudo-legally as well as permitted laxity in emissions control. He is the THE worst possible choice short of an oil company president for the position of EPA head.

[Stare At The Sun]

damn, that blows. Maybe he will have a change of heart, and do his job right...then again, maybe not..