When US Interior Sec. Ken Salazar, soon after taking office, ordered the Bureau of Land Management to cancel 77 leases from a December 2008 lease sale in Utah, he said the tracts were included under pressure from the previous administration, and that their resource management plans were products of a flawed process.
Now, says Michael McKee, a county commissioner in eastern Utah's Uintah County, it's time for Interior to make public findings of investigators from its inspector general's office that there wasn't pressure to include the disputed tracts in the sale after all.
"The courts and the public deserve to know how the cancelled 77 Utah oil and gas leases, which the Obama administration chose to criticize to justify its unlawful cancellation, were cleared of any wrongdoing by Sec. Salazar's own inspector general," McKee said July 9.
He said the county requested a copy of the December 2009 report, No. OI-OG-09-0173-I, informally from DOI's lawyers and formally under the Freedom of Information Act from BLM and the agency's IG, and had not received responses.
No violations, pressure
Through several sources, McKee told OGJ by telephone on July 12 he learned that the IG investigators' report found no inappropriate action or any violation of any regulation, rule, or policy in connection with either the lease sale or the RMPs.
A DOI spokesman confirmed the report's existence and that it found no evidence that undue pressure was exerted on Utah BLM district managers to complete the RMPs before the sale, or to include previously deferred tracts before the administration changed.
"The department fully endorses the IG's report regarding the specific allegations it investigated involving the previous administration," deputy press secretary Jordan Montoya said in a July 12 e-mail.
"The report has no bearing on the current administration's decision to withdraw the leases to conduct further reviews," he added, noting that a federal court in Utah issued an order blocking the sale before Salazar arrived which led the secretary to order another look.
'Only conclusion'
McKee wasn't satisfied. "The secretary continually talked about this 'flawed process' back then, but hasn't made this report public," he said. "It mentions a perception of inappropriate behavior, but found none. The only conclusion is that the process was followed according to law, regulation, and policy, and that therefore there was no need to withdraw the parcels."
He noted that Uintah and two other eastern Utah counties, Carbon and Duchesne, and several producers sued DOI soon after Salazar ordered the leases withdrawn, and that the case finally will be heard July 21 before US District Judge Dee Benson in Salt Lake City. "It's one reason we're pushing to have this report made public," he said.
In late afternoon on July 19, IG's office finally posted the report on its web site.
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