 Now, 32 years later, Longwell is 76, living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and still
waiting for the federal government to make a decision.
Longwell wants to explore for minerals on the 6,247 acres he acquired through a
lease with the Bureau of Land Management so many years ago.
“We have a valid permit, and our client has the right to go and drill,” said
Longwell’s attorney, William Perry Pendley, president and chief legal officer of
Mountain States Legal Foundation.
What’s the hold up?
“There have been other litigations, there has been need for analysis … and that
has taken time,” said Dave Cunningham, public affairs officer for the U.S.
Forest Service in Great Falls, Montana. “The chronology, I think, is very long.”
“They just want us to go away,” Pendley told Watchdog.org. “I just think the
bureaucrats wanted to avoid making a decision. So they’ve just fooled around and
fooled around and had meeting after meeting.”
Longwell and Pendley aren’t the only people frustrated by the drawn-out process.
“No combination of excuses could possibly justify such ineptitude or
recalcitrance for such an epic period of time,” declared federal judge Richard
J. Leon, who ordered the federal government to come up with a schedule, in 21
days, to reach a decision on the suspension status of the application.
The judge said Longwell’s case “by any measure” constitutes an “unreasonable
delay.”
But there’s opposition to developing the site.
Longwell’s lease is in the Lewis and Clark National Forest, next to the
Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. The tribe’s leadership
doesn’t want drilling on the site because, it says, the property encompasses
sacred land called the Badger-Two Medicine, home to the tribe’s creation story.
“We want to protect that area because it’s important to us as a people,”
Blackfeet Tribal Historic Preservation Officer John Murray told Watchdog.org.
“We adamantly oppose any development in that area, strongly oppose it.”
The tribe took the unusual step last month of breaking off all formal
discussions with the federal government and Longwell’s Louisiana-based company,
Solonex LLC, saying it saw no use in further negotiations.
“We are not going to speak to anything other than no development,” Murray said
at the time.
The Blackfeet Nation has launched a media campaign to fight the proposed
development, including erecting billboards, writing a letter to President Obama
and taking to social media with the support of the rock band Pearl Jam.
Related: Obama flips on tribal sovereignty on oil and gas
http://watchdog.org/156061/obama/
Pendley says the tribe is using another delaying tactic and says there’s a long
history of oil and gas development on its land.
According to the Blackfeet Department of Commerce website, the reservation has
11 oil and gas producers, with 39 gas wells in production.
Murray says those sites aren’t on land deemed sacred, such as the Badger-Two
Medicine.
“The area is extremely important to us, dating back to the origins of the
Blackfeet,” Murray said.
Pendley insists the legal fight is between Longwell and the U.S. government, not
the Blackfeet tribe.
“It’s not their land,” Pendley told Watchdog.org, citing a 1988 U.S. Supreme
Court case in which tribes in California protested a Forest Service timber
harvesting project, saying it was in an area considered sacred.
“Justice (Sandra Day) O’Connor said all of that doesn’t matter because at the
end of the day, this is, after all, the (federal) government’s land,” Pendley
said.
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 “It’s not his land, either,” Murray said. “We’re not talking
about Sidney Longwell’s land. Those leases were illegally let.”
The tribe argues the leases should be rescinded for not following
federal environmental impact statements, and the Blackfeet were not
properly consulted.
According to court records, Longwell acquired the lease in 1982
through a lottery system administered under President Reagan. The
rental fee on the lease, which has been in suspension, works out to
about $1 an acre.
“The Reagan administration was in favor of development of energy
on federal lands, and I guess subsequent administrations were less
interested in that,” Pendley said.
The application to drill was OK’d twice but suspended after
President Clinton took office. It was permanently suspended in 1998,
where the application has remained.
The tribe says development on the Badger-Two Medicine would mar the
area.
“We are not opposed to exploration, but the Badger-Two Medicine is a
sacred area to us, and that’s off the table,” Tyson Running Wolf of
the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council told the Missoulian newspaper
in April.
“In the early days (of Longwell’s lease), the tribe signed off on
Forest Service studies that indicated there were no cultural
resources affected by proposed activity, but that’s changed over
time,” Pendley said.
Pendley says the drilling site would have a small footprint.
“We’re talking about one drilling pad,” Pendley said. “I don’t know
the size of the pad, but it’s a relatively small area. I assume
we’re going in with one rig.”
In the meantime, the 21-day clock is ticking.
“Right now we’re making sure that we do everything” that Judge Leon
ordered, the Forest Service’s Cunningham said, “and build a schedule
to comply with his ruling.”
Leon wants federal officials to rule on whether the suspension on
Longwell’s lease will be lifted — in which case, exploration on the
site will get the legal green light — or rejected.
“(The federal government) has no basis to say no,” Pendley said.
“And we will be in court getting an order to allow us to drill.
Failing that, the government is going to have to start writing a
check. If the government wants to go so far as to simply say no,
then we need to find out what’s the value of what we own and what
they’re denying us the ability to use.”
The Blackfeet tribe won’t quit, either.
“If we get a bad decision in this whole process, there’s a court of
law that we can bring to the forefront the whole idea that those
leases were illegally let in the first place,” Murray said. “That
hasn’t been contested yet.”
After more than three decades, is the Forest Service confident the
impasse can finally be resolved?
“That’s kind of a judgment call, a speculative call,” Cunningham
said. “Really, what we’re working on right now is just complying
with the judge’s order in terms of providing the information he
requested within the 21 days.”
And what about the 76-year-old Longwell?
Watchdog.org left a message at his home in Louisiana, but he did not
return the call.
Pendley said his client is still determined to exercise the
application to drill he obtained back in the early 1980s.
“He was a fairly young man and excited about winning the lease on
property that all the studies show has great potential for natural
gas.”
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