ASSOCIATED PRESS
SACRAMENTO -- Legislative leaders accused the Wilson administration Tuesday of trying to acquire property for the Ward Valley nuclear waste dump even though top officials knew they had no legal authority to get the land.
The Democratic leaders, in a letter to Vice President Al Gore, said the Republican governor's Department of Health Services tried to push through the property acquisition to get the project completed.
They also said a review of government documents showed that the Department of Health Services made "a conscious attempt to evade the Legislature."
"DHS knew its actions were illegal almost a year before submitting its application to purchase Ward Valley," the leaders wrote to Gore, citing internal government documents.
Wilson spokeswoman Lisa Kalustian said the letter was incorrect and a "political ploy."
"The state had specific authorization and written approval from the Department of Finance to accept the land, and the Department of Health Services worked very closely with the state Legislature as well as the Department of the Interior on this process," she said.
Wilson favors the dump, which would store low-level nuclear waste in the Southern California desert near Needles, about 20 miles west of the Colorado River.
The project is opposed by environmentalists, local officials, Indian groups and others. It has been stalled in a lengthy legal and political dispute with the federal government.
The opponents include the city of Los Angeles, which two weeks ago urged the project to be delayed until authorities determine that it won't contaminate that city's water supply.
The letter to Gore was signed by Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and John Burton, the state Senate's president pro tem, of San Francisco.
The leadership "urgently requests that the Department of the Interior stop all activity which could lead to an eventual transfer of the land, and refuse to consider DHS's improper request to acquire the land for the state of California," the letter said.
"The Legislature never gave DHS free rein to ignore state law," said Kuehl, the Assembly's No. 2 Democrat. "DHS has no statutory authority to request a direct sale of federal land. Only a handful of state agencies have that authority, and DHS is not one of them."
Wilson's administration licensed U.S. Ecology Inc. to accept low-level radioactive waste from hospitals and nuclear plants for burial in trenches at the dump.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management owns Ward Valley and was to transfer the area to California, according to a deal worked out in Congress in the 1980s. However, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt asked for additional environmental testing to be conducted after a similar dump in Nevada was found to be leaking.
U.S. Ecology and the state Department of Health Services are suing Babbitt and the Interior Department to force transfer of the land to the state.
Edition: CCT, Section: A, Page: 11