Senators say interior secretary to leave Hanford Reach monument as is

The nation’s interior secretary has made a commitment not to change the status of the Hanford Reach National Monument, according to Washington state’s two Democratic senators. Sen. Patty Murray and Sen. Maria Cantwell spoke to Secretary Ryan Zinke in a joint phone call on Wednesday, according to their staffs. “Today, the Department of Interior confirmed what so many Washingtonians have known all along — that the Hanford Reach, designated after years of collaboration in the Tri-Cities community, is worthy of protection for generations to come,” Murray said. Murray led efforts in the 1990s to establish the national monument from nearly 200,000 acres of land that had remained undeveloped, and some of it largely untouched, since it was set aside as a security perimeter around the Hanford nuclear reservation in 1943. Cantwell, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said “An attack on one of our national monuments is an attack on all of them.” “Now that Secretary Zinke agrees that the protection of the Hanford Reach National Monument should not be changed, the Trump administration should abandon this review and the ill-advised effort to undermine national monuments altogether,” Cantwell said...more