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Interior Secretary Gale Norton Resigns
Yahoo News/AP
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer
March 11, 2006

WASHINGTON - President Bush is seeking a replacement for Gale Norton, an original member of his Cabinet, to run the Interior Department.

Norton announced Friday that she was leaving as secretary at the end of March, capping five years during which she guided the administration's initiative to open federal lands in the West to more oil and gas drilling, logging, grazing and commercial recreation.

Norton, who was attorney general of Colorado from 1991 to 1999, said she hopes to return eventually to the Mountain West,

"Now I feel it is time for me to leave this mountain you gave me to climb, catch my breath, then set my sights on new goals to achieve in the private sector," she said in her two-page resignation letter.

Norton leaves at a time when a major lobbying scandal involving Indian gaming licenses that required her consent looms over her agency, but there has been no indication of possible wrongdoing on her part.

She is the first member of Bush's Cabinet to leave in well over a year — when there was a substantial makeover immediately following the president's 2004 re-election to a second term.

A day shy of her 52nd birthday, Norton emphasized in her letter to Bush and in remarks to reporters that her reasons for leaving were entirely personal. She said she hadn't done any job-searching, wanted to spend more time with her husband, John, and take time for recreational pursuits like skiing.

Her communications director, Tina Kreisher, said Norton had decided she wanted to step down as interior secretary last year, just before hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf coast.

"When Katrina and Rita hit, she felt a responsibility to stay on," Kreisher said.

Bush called Norton a strong advocate for "the wise use and protection of our nation's natural resources."

"When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region, she played a leading role in my administration's efforts to restore badly needed offshore energy production," he said.

As an architect of Bush's energy policy, Norton eased regulations to speed approval of oil and gas drilling permits, particularly in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming's Powder River Basin.

In her first three years, the pace of drilling permits issued by Interior's Bureau of Land Management rose 70 percent. She also was the administration's biggest advocate for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's North Slope to oil drilling, areas considered sensitive for caribou and other wildlife.

"We have improved the ways we are protecting wildlife in ways that energy development is responsible," Norton said Friday. "We spent billions of dollars in improving wildlife habitat and otherwise restoring the environment.

Many environmentalists and Democrats have been sharply critical of her stewardship of public lands.

"Gale Norton was an unpopular symbol of unpopular policies," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

"Americans do not believe their public lands should be sold to the highest bidder, and they don't believe in privatizing their parks, forests, monuments. While the symbol of those unpopular policies may be leaving, we don't expect those unpopular policies to change."

But others, such as the Nature Conservancy's president, Steve McCormick, praised her for working as close partners in creating Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park, the new Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge in Minnesota and the Rocky Mountain Front Conservation Area in Montana.

Norton led the administration's push for "cooperative conservation" — shifting more of the responsibility for land management and recovery of endangered species to states and local communities. The Interior Department oversees the government's ownership of one-fifth of the nation's land.

Until Bush appoints a successor, Deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett will take the helm of the agency.

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