LONE LAWMAKER STALLS LAND BILL.

Byline: John H. Cushman Jr. The New York Times

The future of a number of parks and public lands around the nation was tangled up Wednesday with questions about logging in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska as a single senator from that state refused to relax his grip on broad legislation affecting some 41 states.

Also held hostage are scores of other parks, trails and battlegrounds affected by the stalled bill. If the legislation survives the bargaining, it will be one of the last accomplishments of the 104th Congress.

It is an object lesson in the kind of wrangling that often lengthens the final days of a legislative session, and an environmental dispute of the kind that has been especially divisive in this Congress.

In the balance are such far-flung properties as the former military base at the Presidio near San Francisco, a tallgrass prairie preserve in Kansas, and even the Craters of the Moon - not the ones on the lunar surface, to be sure, but the park by that name in Idaho, whose borders are to be slightly adjusted.

In exchange for all that, Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, taking advantage of Senate rules and deadlines that allow a single naysayer to block almost anything, is seeking an extension of timber sales to a Ketchikan company.

Having lost his earlier attempt to include such a provision in the legislation, he now wants it done by the administration, by fiat.

The two sides continued Wednesday to talk about some inducement, probably falling short of what Murkowski wants, but enough for him to let the Senate vote on the bill, which overwhelmingly passed the House on Saturday.

The obscure deal Murkowski is struggling to pull from the dying embers of an exhausted Congress is of paramount interest to logging interests in the Tongass, a vast temperate rain forest rich in ancient trees.

Ketchikan Pulp Co., a subsidiary of Louisiana-Pacific Corp., has been allowed for decades to process timber from the forest into pulp, an arrangement that environmentalists strongly oppose. The contract runs out in 2004, and the company has said it will close the pulp mill soon, laying off hundreds of workers, unless the timber contract is extended.

Wednesday, Murkowski met with White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta to see what concession might be extracted - perhaps a supply of timber for a short, transitional period before the arrangement ultimately comes to an end.

Although the White House is not willing to do all that the senator has sought, its negotiators are attempting to persuade Murkowski that good-faith talks on future logging by the Alaska company would continue, and that he need not hold unrelated legislation hostage.

``We are trying to give him an assurance that we will negotiate these points swiftly and fairly,'' said a senior administration official.

While this concession might seem modest for such high-stakes talks, Murkowski is under intense pressure from other senators to drop his opposition.

Lawmakers from California want the bill to pass, not just because it would set up a foundation to pay for preservation of the Presidio, but also because it would provide hundreds of millions in federal aid for a project to restore water quality in the San Francisco Bay and the rivers that feed it.

There are more than a hundred other provisions dear to the hearts of innumerable senators and representatives, providing land for an Olympic ski slope in Utah, establishing historic sites commemorating whalers, suffragettes and black patriots, and dozens of other provisions.

But nowhere in this version of the bill is there anything for the pulp mill that Murkowski has been trying all year to assist.