1/09/00 2:40 p.m.
Norton’s No Foe of Environment
Her complex record.

By Melissa Seckora, NR editorial associate

espite opposition from environmental groups, lawmakers agree (for now) that there is little chance Gale Norton, the former Colorado attorney general, will not be confirmed as Interior Secretary in the Bush administration. Yet groups including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council insist that Norton, known for her market-oriented and local-control approaches to solving environmental problems, is an environmental lightweight whose confirmation should be vigorously opposed.

Environmental activists are not alone, however, in questioning Norton’s ability to head the Interior Department. Her record on the environment — specifically, her handling of one of America’s worst environmental disasters — was called into question again, in a page-one story in Sunday’s New York Times.

Norton investigated the Summitville Consolidated Mining Corporation and its owner, Robert Friedland, for an incident involving the spillage of toxic waste from a gold mine that killed 17 miles of river and forced an emergency takeover by the EPA in 1992. Her investigation was a success, showing that she could work with the federal government when necessary. In at least a dozen other environmental cleanup projects — including Rocky Mountain Arsenal and the Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant — Norton demonstrated that she has both the legal skill and policy understanding necessary to clean up after our nation’s worst environmental accidents. But, more importantly, Norton tried some novel ways to fix the pollution problems in her state, namely by going after the federal government.

In the case of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, one of the nation’s dirtiest cleanup sites, Norton not only went after the biggest polluter in the country; she set a legal precedent. “She pioneered the concept of holding the federal government, the nation’s largest polluter, responsible for environmental quality,” said Troy Eid, chief counsel to Colorado Gov. Bill Owens.

The Arsenal is a 27-square-mile Superfund site north of the Stapleton International Airport. The site includes, among its hazardous materials, munitions and chemical-weapons byproducts. Mustard gas was made at a factory on the site from 1943 to 1946. From 1952 to 1988, Shell Oil Co. used the same property to make pesticides. The site is owned by the U.S. Army, which is also in charge of a $2 billion cleanup effort, which started in 1985, to convert the site into a wildlife refuge.

In 1994, while serving as attorney general, Norton fought federal officials in the U.S. Supreme Court over federal sovereignty, which exempts federal facilities from meeting the same regulations that private companies must meet. “Ms. Norton personally and aggressively pursued the legal arguments. She led a national effort to force the federal government to meet the same standards as everyone else. It was a major win,” said Tim Tymkovich, the solicitor general under Norton. The Court granted state environmental regulators the power to enforce Colorado’s tougher pollution standards, denying the Clinton administration's claim that the cleanup of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal should be dictated by the federal Superfund law. U.S. Army officials had asked the Court to exempt them from Colorado environmental laws. At the time, lawyers said that the case set a major legal precedent for other states trying to gain control over polluted federal sites.

But before she pursued Summitville and Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Norton entered and won a precedent-setting lawsuit settlement with the U.S. Department of Energy over hazardous-waste storage at the Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant, a former plutonium-trigger plant northwest of Denver. The settlement allowed the state to draft its own guidelines for the safe storage of 600 cubic tons of plutonium-laced waste. In a statement announcing the settlement, Norton said: “This is the first judicial order in the country to contain a stipulated-penalty provision that can be used against the federal government for hazardous-waste violations. It gives us a useable enforcement tool to enforce compliance.”

In that particular effort, Norton had the backing of the Sierra Club (the original plaintiffs in the suit). “It’s been five years; the waste has been stored illegally more than ten years,” said Brad Masi, spokesman for the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club. “We’re excited.”