Jim Gibbons Candidate for governor says he had nothing to do with whistle-blower's firing

Did Republican gubernatorial nominee Jim Gibbons care more about protecting the mining industry than protecting his constituents from radiation?

That's the claim of Nevada Democrats, who say Gibbons was involved in silencing a worker at a contaminated former mine site who won a federal whistle-blower complaint.

"Gibbons had the chance to do the right thing when dangers at the mine were being exposed," Kirsten Searer, spokeswoman for the Nevada Democratic Party, said in a statement. "Instead, he chose to use his position to protect his cronies and himself."

"That's false," Gibbons countered on Wednesday, saying he had nothing to do with the whistle-blower's firing and was only trying to keep the site in question under the management of the state rather than the federal government.

"I don't even know this individual. I've never met him. I've never talked to him. I've never talked to anyone about him. This is an empty political charge by the Democrats," Gibbons said.

Earle Dixon, a former site manager for the federal Bureau of Land Management at the abandoned former Anaconda copper mine near Yerington, said he was marginalized and eventually fired after he tried to call attention to uranium and other toxic materials at the mine site.

Last week, a federal administrative law judge sided with Dixon, finding that BLM officials fired him illegally in retaliation for speaking out.

A month before Dixon's October 2004 firing, and after Dixon began aggressively pursuing measurement of uranium radiation on the site, Gibbons sent the agency a letter saying it should move oversight of the mine cleanup away from the office where Dixon worked. But Gibbons and the agency's state director at the time have said Gibbons' letter and Dixon's departure were unrelated.

Gibbons, a five-term congressman, was previously a mining geologist and lands attorney. His district, which includes 16 of Nevada's 17 counties and part of the 17th, is largely made up of federal land and is home to the world's third-largest gold-mining industry.

Yerington, in Lyon County, has a population of less than 3,000. The former mine also is near a Paiute Indian reservation.

In his Sept. 9, 2004, letter to Robert Abbey, the BLM's Nevada director at the time, Gibbons wrote, "I am contacting you to request that the management of the Yerington Mine site project be moved from the Carson City District Office to the Nevada State Office," in Reno.

Gibbons' letter says the request was a result of continuing efforts to make the mine a Superfund site, listed on the Environmental Protection Agency's priority roster. Gibbons and others believed a Superfund designation would stigmatize Yerington as a disaster area and hurt the local economy.

Gibbons' 2004 letter said moving BLM oversight to Reno might help BLM work with other agencies on the cleanup, thereby convincing authorities that a Superfund designation wasn't necessary.

At the time, the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection was the lead agency partnering with BLM and the EPA to get the former mine site -- owned by Atlantic Richfield Co., which is owned by energy giant British Petroleum -- cleaned up.

Dangers that Dixon was pointing to at the time, and the state environmental department's apparent attempt to hush them up, were key pieces of evidence cited by those who believed Superfund designation was necessary.

Since Dixon's departure, a compromise was reached whereby EPA became the head agency on the cleanup but no official Superfund designation was made.

Gibbons, who has accepted more than $4,000 in donations from Atlantic Richfield during his nearly two decades in politics, said Wednesday his advocacy was related only to his feelings about state vs. federal control.

"At that point in time, it was my view that the state's involvement was the best way to find a solution to the problem," he said. "My letter simply said the site should have unified management. I thought that the three agencies could do best under Nevada leadership and that Bob Abbey's leadership was best for the problem. It was about jurisdiction, not about personnel."

Although federal leadership was since deemed necessary for the cleanup, Gibbons said he stood by his position that it was the state environmental agency that was best equipped to manage the project and make sure nearby residents were safe.

"I'm a firm believer today that the state of Nevada is far better to handle that," he said. "I still believe that it should be under the leadership of Bob Abbey, along with the other agencies."

Gibbons said he didn't think people living near the mine were in danger because of the state's former leadership of the project.

"The most important thing to me is the safety and security of the people I represent," Gibbons said. "But whenever you leave it to the federal government, you're going to end up with delays and problems that are characteristic of the government bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. You've got to try to keep the federal government out of it."