Clinton Plans ‘Lands Legacy’ Initiative

WASHINGTON — President Clinton on Tuesday signaled his intention to create three national monuments in the West--including one that would encompass thousands of small, federally owned islands, rocks and exposed reefs along California’s coastline extending 12 miles out to sea.

Clinton also suggested that he will invoke his executive authority to expand by nearly half the size of the 16,265-acre Pinnacles National Monument south of San Jose to protect watershed and wildlife habitat from commercial exploitation.

The president sent to Congress a list of 18 other natural or historic sites throughout the country that will be acquired--and protected--under his $652-million “lands legacy” initiative. Funds for these purchases were provided by the budget Clinton signed two weeks ago.

“We must use this time of unparalleled prosperity to ensure people will always be able to see these places as we see them today,” Clinton said. “There is no greater gift we can offer to the new millennium than to protect these treasures for all Americans, for all time.”

The other two national monument sites, nominated by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, are in Arizona: about 1 million acres abutting the Grand Canyon’s north rim, and about 70,000 acres of desert about 40 miles north of Phoenix that are rich in archeological sites and pictographs.

As the president spoke of the four sites, all federally owned, he left little doubt that he intends early next year to follow Babbitt’s recommendations. Such status would add restrictions on access and use.

“By giving these lands national monument status, we would ensure that they could be passed along to future generations healthy and whole,” Clinton said.

Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, every president except Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush has created at least one monument, according to Babbitt. Most of America’s national parks were created under the act, he added.

But that did not assuage many congressional Republicans, who have long been at odds with the Clinton administration over land use policy.

Among them was Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a contender for the GOP presidential nomination. He called it a unilateral decision that should be reached only by an act of Congress.

But Babbitt said that thousands of federally owned offshore islands and rocks need protection to guard against mining by entrepreneurs who have been known to convert such rocks into kitty litter.

“And there have been a variety of those kinds of proposals from people thinking that these rocks might look better ground up and merchandised,” Babbitt said.

“Those are rocks where all the vast flocks of birds are coming in, where the pelicans are molting at breeding time,” he added. “They really are a treasure. And the time is now at hand to make certain that they are protected.”

The Clinton administration decided to issue an executive order on the offshore islands and the Pinnacles expansion after concluding that the Republican-controlled Congress has no intention of taking up proposals by Rep. Sam Farr (D-Carmel) to designate the islands as wilderness areas and to expand Pinnacles.

“I’m overjoyed,” Farr said Tuesday. “With these two initiatives, we are taking substantial steps toward protecting the environment for our future generations.”

The Pinnacles National Monument was created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 to protect what Clinton described Tuesday as “spectacular volcanic spires and mountain caves.” It began with 2,060 acres but has been expanded six times, five by presidential fiat and once by Congress.

The new national monument near the Grand Canyon would include the Colorado Plateau north of Grand Canyon National Park extending west to the Nevada state line and encompassing part of Lake Mead. The monument north of Phoenix would include public land north of Perry and Black mesas and the Agua Fria River canyon.

The 18 sites to be purchased under the “lands legacy” program are in Colorado (Gunnison Basin and Silver Mountain), Florida (Pelican Island National Wildlife Refugee), Hawaii (Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refugee), Idaho (Sawtooth National Recreation Area), Georgia (the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site), Minnesota (the Chippewa and Superior national forests), North Carolina (Lake Logan), Tennessee (Gulf Tract and the Stones River National Battlefield), Utah (Bonneville Shoreline Trail and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument), Virginia (the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefield Memorial National Park), Washington (Mountains to Sound Greenway) and Wyoming (Royal Teton Ranch).

Also on the president’s list: the Virginia Islands National Park and the Chattooga Wild and Scenic River, which flows through the Carolinas and Georgia.

“There are certain places humankind simply cannot improve upon, places whose beauty and interest no photograph could capture, places you simply have to see for yourself,” Clinton said.