Council: Don't drill Badger Two Med
Noting the significance of the landscape to the Blackfeet people's history and culture, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation Monday recommended that a longstanding oil and gas lease in the Badger-Two Medicine be canceled.
The council made the recommendation after a public hearing earlier this month when more than 150 people attended a meeting in Choteau to express their opposition to plans by the Solonex Corp. to do exploratory drilling in the region just south of Glacier National Park.
The council's findings, enclosed in a 10-page letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, were blunt and to the point.
"The ACHP recommends that the Departments of Agriculture and Interior revoke the suspended permit to drill, cancel the lease, and ensure that future mineral development does not occur," the council said.
The council found that it was the intent of Congress to ban oil and gas exploration along the Rocky Mountain Front when it passed previous legislation that did just that along most of the region.
But the Badger-Two Medicine, which had this one active, and long standing disputed lease, was left out.
The entire 165,588-acre area, which encompasses lands within the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Lewis and Clark National Forest, and Flathead National Forest is a designated Traditional Cultural District under the National Historic Preservation Act.
The lease was originally granted in the 1980s and then languished in Forest Service bureaucracy for decades.
Solonex then sued the Forest Service and earlier this year and a federal judge admonished the agency for dragging its feet on the lease.
Responding to a court order, the Department of Interior released a two-year plan to the court on how it would examine the lease.
The first step was the examination by the preservation council. Opponents of the lease have long held that they were granted illegally in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration.
Solonex, owned by Lousiana oilman Sydney Longwell, owns about 3,200 acres of leases in the Badger-Two Medicine.
Their plan is to punch a road into what is now a roadless area and set up a 4-acre wellpad.
If the well panned out, the company would presumably drill more wells, the council determined.
"I have lived near the Badger long enough to know that there is no way to mitigate a four-acre well pad, a road, and industrial development in the heart of this wild and roadless country. That could only be the beginnings for oil and gas, and would forever scar this glorious landscape and all that goes with it. We stand in solidarity with the Blackfeet and call for the cancellation of these illegal leases," said Kendall Flint, President of the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance.
The Forest Service in recent years has taken other measures to protect the area, including a snowmobile ban a few years ago. The area is home to a large elk herd and is also prime grizzly bear and westslope cutthroat trout habitat.
It's now up to the land management agencies involved on whether to actually cancel the leases.