Haley Stevens: “I have been involved in this issue now for a substantial portion of my life. I was in the Interior Department during the…”

“I have been involved in this issue now for a substantial portion of my life. I was in the Interior Department during the Eisenhower administration, 1955 to 1961. At the end of that period, I was the Solicitor of the Interior Department. During that period, we obtained statehood for Alaska. The whole question of what our rights would be as a State was debated at length, not only in the Congress but in the White House and the old Bureau of the Budget. The Revised Statute 2477 was the basis for really the modernization of the West. And when we came to the period of the seventies--and I was here as a Senator--when the proposal was made to repeal R.S. 2477 in 1974, I had a very long debate with Senator Haskell of Colorado at the time, and we subsequently did not pass the bill in that Congress. In 1976, when the rights-of-way bill was brought up again, we discussed at length the protections that would assure that the commitment that was being made to the Western States, in general, and Alaska, in particular, would be ironclad.”