| OCR Text |
Show new federal stripmlnlng legislation leg-islation is enacted, it should be administered at the state level. The Secretary of the Interior and the Director of the Federal Engergy Administration Admin-istration agreed with Senator Hatch's comment. Arthritis Sufferers: HATCH REVEALS 'DOCTORING' OF MINING STUDY An impartial study of the necessity for federal strip -mining regulations has apparently ap-parently been doctored in order to justify to Congress a need for the proposed regulations. reg-ulations. That discovery was revealed re-vealed by Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) during public pub-lic hearings on the Surface Mining Control and Recla-m Recla-m ation Act. Sitting as a temporary member of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Af-fairs, Sen. Hatch confronted confront-ed Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus and Federal Energy Administrator Jack 0Leary with several obvious changes chang-es in substantive facts in what had been suggested to be an impartial report on the "Stripmining Law" prepared pre-pared by ICF, Incorporated, a Washington -based re- v search and consulting firm. The independent consulting consult-ing firm delivered a summary sum-mary of its study to the Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Environmen-tal Protection Agency late last month. Apparently someone in those agencies or at ICF altered the independent inde-pendent analysis and then circulated the doctored information in-formation as independent re -search compiled by ICF. Sen. Hatch asked Secretary Secre-tary Andrus, "Do you believe be-lieve a federal agency who calls upon outside, independent indepen-dent expertise to provide data should revise those independent inde-pendent figures to apparantly suit its needs?" The Administrator of Federal Fed-eral Engergy, JackO'Leary, promised Sen. Hatch and the other members of the Interior Inter-ior Committee that a full investigation in-vestigation of the alleged doctoring would be conducted and an explanation delivered to the Senators. 1 Senator Hatch indicated his continuing concern with the Stripmining Bill by saying, ' 'I have questions about a bill whose defects have apparently appar-ently been glossed over by either the independent source of information or by two federal fed-eral agencies with a onesided one-sided environmental point of view." The Senator from Utah pointed out that at least three Western states have approved ap-proved stripmining laws as determined by the Department Depart-ment of the Interior, and if ' |
