Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Tuesday ended the government's defense of a land exchange agreement that would have allowed the Alaska Peninsula community of King Cove to build a road to reach the all-weather airport.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Tuesday ended the government’s defense of a land exchange agreement that would have allowed the Alaska Peninsula community of King Cove to build a road to reach the all-weather airport. But she committed to a new process that will get a road for King Cove, even though it will mean going through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.
“I have instructed my team to immediately launch a process to review previous proposals for a land exchange,” Haaland said in an emailed statement. The new process will be “rooted in a commitment to engagement in meaningful nation-to-nation consultation with tribes, to protecting the national wildlife refuge system, and to upholding the integrity of ANILCA’s subsistence and conservation purposes,” she said, referring to the 1980 law called the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act.
Haaland’s action – essentially conceding in a court case brought by conservation groups trying to block the road – starts yet another phase in the decades-long effort by the people of King Cove to get a road to Cold Bay, which they say will save lives by allowing people to fly to a hospital even when the weather is bad.
The Interior Department says it intends to initiate an environmental analysis that will reconsider the 2013 land exchange that Sally Jewell, an Interior secretary in the Obama administration, rejected.
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