28 ALASKA RESOURCE REVIEW FALL 2024 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 26 “Continuing these essential protections, which have been in place for decades, will ensure continued access and use of these public lands,” by local villages and tribes, Haaland said in an August 27 press release. However, in a separate but related action, her Interior Department reneged on a commitment made in early 2024 to fairly review the transfer of lands along the TAPS pipeline corridor. This north-south corridor extends from state lands on the southern North Slope, to the Yukon River and includes the Dalton Highway as well as the pipeline. Its control is vital to Alaska’s economic future. What’s surprising is that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was well along in July in a process that would transfer the corridor, which is held in Public Land Order 5150. BLM had concluded internally that the remaining PLOs no longer served a public purpose and recommended their termination including PLO 5150 and the pipeline corridor. However, when the agency released the final Environmental Impact Statement for the Central Yukon Resource Management Plan, which included PLO 5150, the plan to release the corridor was not included. The PLOs remained intact, contrary to the advice of BLM’s own staff. Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan said this points to a likely intervention by the White House into the plan agreed on by the BLM with the state, Sullivan wrote in an August letter to Tracey Stone-Manning, BLM’s national director. “Your decision to abruptly abandon the public process associated with lifting the PLO 5150, without notice, at the same time that far-left environmental groups are trying to shut down the Trans Alaska Pipeline System raises questions regarding potential collusion between the Biden administration and the Lower 48 radical environmentalists,” Sullivan wrote. BLM cited “workload” issues as its reason for failing to fulfill the agreement with the state in a June hearing of U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which infuriated Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was at the hearing. Sullivan said he considered this an “affront” to Alaskans. In the Senate committee hearing Tracey Stone-Manning said the decision not to move forward with the PLO 5150 transfer was made through internal discussions within her agency and that there was no input from the White House. Alaska BLM director Steve Cohn told
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