Governor Freudenthal Hopeful Coal Leasing and Grand Teton State Land Issues will be Resolved

Press Release

Today at his bi-monthly press conference, Governor Dave Freudenthal said his discussions with Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey were positive and should help to move two important issues forward: coal leasing and state lands in Grand Teton National Park.

The governor and Director Abbey toured a coal mine in Campbell County and oil & gas operations in Carbon County yesterday.

Text of audio clip:"It was just the issues you'd expect. We talked about sage grouse, we talked about reclamation, we talked about oil and gas leasing. And you know, there's significant disagreement but I think we had a good, fruitful discussion about what we might be able to agree on and go forward. Because I think he is committed to trying to make progress on these leasing questions and acknowledged that they've kind of been held up for awhile. He's going to try to see if we can move things forward. He's clearly not going to cut any corners in terms of the environmental analysis and we didn't ask him to do that. But a lot of this stuff is just sitting there waiting for someone's signature. And so we're hoping that process is going to be moved forward. There should be some announcement this week out of the BLM on the question of the issuance of the outstanding oil and gas leases that are setting there in Wyoming."

Gov. Freudenthal hopes to have a proposal drafted, within 30 days, that would resolve the long-standing issue of state school sections within Grand Teton National Park. Freudenthal said three things have to happen: 1) the transaction has to be structured; 2) funding has to be identified to pay for the transaction and 3) there has to be support from the Obama administration and Wyoming's Congressional delegation. Freudenthal outlined a possible transaction.

Text of audio clip:"Get a front-end payment out of the land and water conservation fund and then structure the next set of payments to finish out the transaction with an authorization -- and this is why you're going to need Congressional help and from the administration both -- for us to be paid an additional lump-sum out of future coal lease bonuses. As you know, there are about 12-14 coal lease sales that are scheduled in Wyoming over the next 18 months or so, assuming everything shakes loose. Half of that money automatically comes to the state and we use it for school construction. What I've suggested to them is why don't we just set up a structure where we do a proper kind of accounting for accrual of interest on the purchase price and that we set it up so it would be payable out of the federal share of those coal lease bonus payments so that when they come in we help deal with the pay-go problem by saying it's one-time bonus money, one-time expenditure in terms of the purchase of the land. They're looking at that. I would say that Director Abbey and I had pretty good conversations about it but right now we're still looking at some other options."

Freudenthal said that the likely sticking point on the state land issue will be money.

On another federal issue, the disaster declaration for Fremont County signed yesterday by President Barack Obama, Gov. Freudenthal said he was pleased that they had turned it around fairly quickly.

Text of audio clip:"What it does is it makes it available for us to take governmental expenses forward to them and see how much they will pay for. In past years it has been 75/25 but sometimes, depending on the project, it may be 50/50 and some of the things we think will qualify really don't qualify. It opens the door for us to go ahead and demonstrate with further detail the kind of expenditures we made and obviously we're going to be looking at some of this bridgework. We spent an awful lot of money paying guardsmen, special overtime and things for the different personnel. There is a fair amount of money there. I hate to say we're going to get--what did we have, 7.5 (million) or something or a little more? I hate to say for sure that we're going to get exactly that amount because we've got additional documentation that has to be provided."

Freudenthal explained that damage didn't reach the necessary threshold that would make it possible to assist individuals directly and he called that a hardship

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