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Bumptious Interior Secretary James Watt found himself at the center of a new embroilment last week. The cause of the row: Watt's alleged mismanagement of the Federal Government's coal-leasing program, which, according to a House Appropriations Committee report, permitted the energy industry to buy coal-leasing rights at "fire sale" prices and reap "windfall profits" at taxpayers' expense...
...page study, issued after an eight-month investigation, focuses on the April 28, 1982, auction of leases to 13 tracts in the prized Powder River Basin area. Interior officials say the sale, involving more than 21,000 acres" and 1.6 billion tons of coal, was the largest in the nation's history...
...House report charges the base price is $60 million less than the committee investigators feel the properties are worth. Moreover, says the report, "such large-scale leasing under poor economic conditions distorts the market by flooding it with leased coal." In sometimes acrimonious testimony before the committee's Interior Subcommittee, Garrey Carruthers, Assistant Secretary for Land and Water Resources, maintained that the sale brought the Government $11 million more than the department's original $55 million estimate. The congressional report is "a poorly prepared and deceitful political document," he fumed. "We do not give coal away...
...fresh guidelines for the Powder River Basin auction, the committee report said, experts in the regional office of Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) in Casper, Wyo., spent 4,000 man-hours trying to determine the fair market "value" for each tract. But, feeling that the figures were not reliable, department officials in Washington rejected them. Barely one month before the sale, Interior came up with its own "entry level" bids, some of which were as much as half the MMS recommendation. The new prices, said an MMS official who worked on the original set of figures, "were...
...uphold our free democratic system." Excerpts from the President's remarks appear in this week's World section. In addition to meeting the President and presenting him with a glass eagle as a memento of the occasion, the group talked with the ministers of Foreign Affairs, Interior, and Finance, and the Director of Foreign Investments. The Newstour then visited a dusty slum area south of Mexico City, lunched with leaders of the P.R.I., Mexico's dominant political party, and dined at the Mexico City Museum while watching members of the famed Ballet Folklórico de Mexico...