An Interior Department official told a House subcommittee today that the best way to preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is to authorize exploration and development of its potentially rich oil deposits. ``The greatest risk to (the refuge) is to prevent exploration and development in a sound and orderly way,'' said J. Steven Griles, assistant interior secretary for land and mineral management. Griles and other advocates of opening America's biggest wildlife refuge to oil rigs said that the refuge could be hurt if a nation faced another oil crisis that forced Congress into a crash program to find new sources of domestic petroleum. He appeared before the House Interior Water and Power Resources subcommittee, which is taking up the administration's controversial refuge-drilling proposal as time is running out in the 100th Congress. On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Donald Hodel announced that he was shelving one of the more controversial aspects of the push to open the refuge. Put on indefinite hold was the proposal to trade away taxpayer-owned mineral rights on 166,000 acres of the refuge on Alaska's north slope. The announcement was made by Interior Secretary Donald Hodel on the eve of hearings by the House Interior water and power resources subcommittee into the larger question of allowing drilling on the refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain. The Interior Committee is one of the final congressional battlegrounds for the outgoing administration in its 18-month-old struggle against the calendar and environment-conservation lobby over the future of the refuge. Hodel said the plan to trade the mineral rights for 891,000 acres elsewhere in Alaska was being put on hold at least until after Congress decides whether to open the refuge to petroleum development. In a prepared statement, Hodel said he was indefinitely delaying publication of a legislative environmental impact statement (LEIS) on the trade, the necessary study document that would be used to justify the deal. Hodel and other Interior officials have pushed the trade as a way of acquiring valuable fish and wildlife property owned by Aleut, Eskimo and other native corporations, which are anxious to get in on the possible oil rush. ``From the start, it has been our position that Congress first must approve legislation to allow oil and gas leasing in the ANWR coastal plain and second must adopt legislation to ratify the agreements before the proposed exchanges could take effect,'' Hodel said. ``Therefore, I believe it would be premature to publish the draft LEIS on the proposed exchanges until Congress clarifies its intent on ANWR,'' said Hodel, who has gotten drilling legislation approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources and the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries committees. Facing strong opposition from environmentalists and conservationists, the administration and oil industry have argued that the refuge offers the best hope of finding a new major source of domestic petroleum. Bob Walker, an Interior Department spokesman, said the Fish and Wildlife Service was ``right at the brink'' of issuing the land-exchange LEIS when Hodel ordered the delay. ``The process is on hold and the LEIS is on the shelf,'' he said. Walker said the decision had nothing to do with a soon-to-be-released assessment by the congressional General Accounting Office that reportedly concludes the proposed trade is a bad deal for taxpayers. He said the decision was made because ``we didn't want the land trade muddying the waters on whether to develop the refuge. ... The fear was, once we put out the LEIS, it would appear we were bulldozing ahead.''
