SALT LAKE CITY—The government is pulling back on a fine against the college student accused of disrupting a federal lease auction for oil and gas drilling around Utah’s redrock national parks.
A deputy solicitor for the U.S. Department of the Interior said Saturday the government is dropping an $81,000 administrative fine until criminal charges are resolved against Tim DeChristopher, an economics major at the University of Utah.
Lawrence J. Jensen said the Bureau of Land Management is just putting the civil case and demand for payment on hold, but lawyers for DeChristopher are asking the Interior Board of Land Appeals in Arlington, Va., to dismiss the case for good.
“All we’re doing is waiting until the criminal proceeding is over before taking action,” Jensen said Saturday. “We’re suspending the collection effort.”
The BLM fined DeChristopher a day after his criminal indictment April 1 by a federal grand jury.
He faces a trial starting July 6 on felony counts of interfering with a federal auction and making false representations at an auction by bidding for parcels and running up prices at the BLM’s December lease sale in Salt Lake City.
At the Dec. 19 lease sale, DeChristopher grabbed a bidder’s paddle, drove up prices and won 22,000 acres of land for $1.7 million—an amount he later said he didn’t have the means or intention to pay. He has said at street rallies and college lectures it was an act of civil disobedience meant to focus attention on climate change.
DeChristopher’s lawyers argue he can’t be found liable for failing to pay for leases that were later taken out of play by a lawsuit filed by conservation groups, then scrapped by new Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in February.
Pat Shea, one of the defense lawyers, said the BLM is dropping the fine because it “has egg on its face.”
The government’s retreat came the same week Salazar’s deputy, David Hayes, issued a special report that was highly critical of the BLM, saying it pushed aside the National Park Service to offer drilling parcels near Canyonlands and Arches national parks and Dinosaur National Monument.
Salazar said the report confirmed that Bush administration officials in their final days in power were trying “to get as much public land leased for oil and gas development as they possibly could” without regard for Utah’s wild and scenic areas.
Some of the 77 scrapped parcels could go back up for auction after a careful examination of each one, Salazar said.
The Interior Board of Land Appeals must approve Jensen’s offer of dropping the fine, and in response to that, Shea filed papers asking the administrative court to prohibit the government from trying to ever fine DeChristopher again.
