Congress finally approved a controversial land trade for Snowbasin on Thursday, but only after providing more twists and near-death experiences than the perilous Olympic ski races that the swap is designed to help the Ogden resort host.
"This finally puts to rest the opposition to the Olympics in Utah," said a relieved Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah. "The people (in Utah) who fought Snowbasin were essentially the same people who fought having the Olympics at all," he said. "With passage, I think we have cleared the last big obstacle. This should allow time to construct facilities needed before the Olympics."Organizers of the 2002 Winter Games, who plan to host several major pre-Olympic competitions at Snowbasin to test the facilities, praised the Senate action.
The Salt Lake Organizing Committee will "not have to go back on our promises made to the International Olympic Committee on where we'd hold the downhill and Super G events," said Frank Joklik, SLOC board chairman.
The trade gives the resort 1,320 acres from the Forest Service to build a new lift, lodge and other facilities it says it needs to host the Olympic downhill and Super G races. It would also make Snowbasin a four-season resort, not merely a ski mountain.
In exchange, Snowbasin's parent company will give the Forest Service 4,115 acres elsewhere - including a portion of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail on the east bench of Ogden.
However, environmental groups and politicians who oppose the trade said it is a land grab in the name of the Olympics for Earl Holding - whose companies own Little America Hotel, Sinclair Oil, Sun Valley and Snowbasin - that gives up prime land for areas of lesser value.
Holding said in a statement that he appreciated the confidence placed in him by Congress, the president and Olympic organizers. "To them and to the public I wish to say that I take my Olympic and environmental responsibilities at Snowbasin very seriously," he said.
National environmental groups had even asked the White House to veto any bill that contained the trade.
But Bennett put such high value on the trade that he negotiated nonstop during the Senate's final day for passage of a huge national parks bill - affecting 113 projects in 41 states - that included the Snowbasin swap and the "Sand Hollow" trade to relocate a proposed dam to protect Zion National Park streamflows.
The large bill appeared dead several times during the week - and even several different times Thursday - as senators and the White House wrangled over what should be left in and what would prompt a presidential veto or Senate inaction on the package.
At one point last week, President Clinton threatened to veto the package unless Snowbasin, Sand Hollow and 44 other mostly Republican measures were dropped - one of two times the White House lengthened its veto list after Republicans thought they had reached deals on the package with the administration.
But White House opposition to the Utah trades was essentially dropped Saturday when negotiators came up with a package retaining them and other GOP proposals in exchange for also retaining some projects important to the Clinton administration - including several projects in vote-rich California, such as a trust to preserve San Francisco's Presidio.
That package passed the House 404-4 on Saturday after Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, and chairman of the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Lands, made clear nothing would move unless Snow-basin were included.
"I don't think the White House ever seriously objected to Snow-basin," but used veto threats to gain other concessions, Bennett said. "No one ever voted against it in the House or Senate. If the White House were seriously opposed, it would have found someone, somewhere, to vote against it."
Meanwhile, some key senators who had important projects of their own left out of the large, House-passed bill used parliamentary maneuvers to block Senate action until their problems were resolved, and the White House for days refused to budge on its demands.
But Bennett said he and Sens. Bill Bradley, D-N.J. (who wanted federal money to protect Sterling Forest on the New York-New Jersey border), and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. (who wanted action on the Presidio), acted as intermediaries between upset senators and the White House.
They helped retiring Sen. Hank Brown, R-Colo., obtain quick passage of a separate bill for a land trade he had sought for 18 years.
And they helped Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, obtain a side deal with the administration to ensure enough timber from the Tongass rain forest to continue operations at a mill in Ketchikan.
The Murkowski deal fell apart on Thursday, however, when the White House insisted on adding language to a letter outlining the deal even after it had been initialed for approval in Murkowski's presence by White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta.
Murkowski - who complained the White House had "moved the goal posts" several times during the week was incensed and was ready to let the overall parks package die.
Bennett, Bradley and Boxer helped work out a compromise to add some of the language the White House proposed, plus hold a dialogue on the Senate floor outlining what that did and did not mean - which Murkowski felt complied with terms of the original deal.
Such disagreements stalled the adjournment of the Senate on Thursday by nearly four hours, but they were finally worked out and the bill passed. "I've never had the honor of giving birth, but this has been about as close to that as possible," Murkowski said of the painful negotiations.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, complained, "The White House is very dishonest in how they do things. I've never seen anything like it in the time I've been here."
The Sand Hollow exchange swaps sites for a proposed reservoir near Zion National Park - where officials worried it might harm stream flows. The complex deal also makes more land available for a desert tortoise preserve.
Ted Stewart, director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, said if the bill had not passed, it would have threatened a complex deal worked out over several years to protect water rights for Zion. Bennett noted that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had vowed to the press that he would do all he could to enact that deal.
The overall bill also includes a plan to simplify the way the government figures fees for ski resorts that lease public lands, which all sides said in hearings is simpler, fairer and would bring the government more money overall.
But to win approval for that and the Utah land trade, the Utah delegation also had to give up some issues it had long sought to include in the overall parks bill.
That included dropping a provision to create 2.1 million acres of Utah wilderness, eliminating a grazing reform measure and getting rid of a provision to block proposed administration rules on how to determine which byways that crisscross federal lands are legal roads (although a one-year block of that is still in place).
Hatch said he doubts Republicans in the Utah delegation will reintroduce their wilderness bill anytime soon - especially after President Clinton chose to create the 1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Hatch said the likelihood of passing a wilderness bill that Clinton would sign but Republicans would still like is remote. He said only if Bob Dole is elected president would they seriously push their wilderness bill again soon.