by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
As appearing in the Daily Sentinel

At the age of 97, former President Jimmy Carter has stepped into a dispute about a short gravel road to an isolated village in Alaska. The road would connect King Cove, population 750, to the small air strip at Cold Bay, with access by air to Anchorage, 620 miles away. There is no other access except by boats or helicopters, both often sidelined by bad weather.

The road would provide long-needed access to medical care and other vital services, but has been blocked for decades because of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which created 157 million acres of national parks, wilderness areas and wildlife refuges, one of which lies between King Cove and Cold Bay. Years of negotiation finally produced a land exchange solution to allow the road while expanding the refuge, but environmental industry groups sued.

Carter filed a legal brief, calling the Alaska lands bill “the most significant domestic achievement of my political life.” Others view it as proof that he never really understood the West. For me, that became obvious just weeks after his 1977 inauguration, when he stunned the West by announcing a “hit list” of western water projects authorized by Congress that he wanted de-authorized. He was flabbergasted by the political firestorm it caused, and his plummeting popularity in rural America. Nearly every elected official in the West, including members of his own party, attacked him for his failure to understand the realities of the arid region.

Water projects had become the most powerful tools of powerful Congressmen, including Colorado’s Wayne Aspinall, who had made deals for projects that would require generations to complete. Carter’s announcement called for de-authorizing 19 projects, and re-evaluating 13 more, mostly in the South and West. The list even included the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway, the Central Arizona Project and several others already under construction. Congress had negotiated for 30 years or more, forging very delicate agreements through bitter struggles.