Word: reeb
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Your story on President Clinton's efforts to protect Yellowstone National Park from a proposed massive gold mine and the holdout stance of gold field-rights owner Margaret Reeb [AMERICAN SCENE, May 12] may have left some readers with the impression that the Clinton Administration would like to see the private owners of the land come away with nothing from a deal that would protect the park. The government is proposing to exchange assets for the Crown Butte mining company's rights and Reeb's property precisely in order to provide a fair deal for the property owners...
...Reeb will not play ball. "I knew nothing about" the negotiations, she claims. "And when I finally got a copy of the agreement, I practically went into shock." Had any of the parties approached her, she says, she would have informed them, "Well, I'm not interested in selling my property." In part, the stance is just age-old miner's shrewdness: Don't sell your stake unless it's running out. But her rebuff also reflects a century of skirmishing between Western miners and the feds: "We Montanans feel pretty strongly about our love of the land," she says...
...head of Crown Butte's new corporate parent has come calling at least twice since August, entreating her cooperation. But Reeb does not seem receptive to his blandishments. David Rovig, a former Crown Butte head who spent years talking her into leasing her claims to the company, doubts she will sell. "At the end of the day," he says, "Margaret doesn't give a damn whether the thing gets mined or not. She wants her property...
That may be all she ends up with. Katie McGinty, the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, says ominously, "There are other ways for us to arrange this agreement." One might involve Crown Butte's swapping only the land it owns, leaving Reeb's real estate an island in a sea of government property. Although her underground holdings are vast, her actual surface lot may be too small to accommodate a large-scale extraction operation...
Meanwhile, other problems have come up. Since signing the agreement, the Administration has not found any politically acceptable properties for a swap. It may have to try to pry $65 million out of a Republican Congress through deferred agricultural subsidies. By comparison, Margaret Reeb could come to seem a pushover...