Land and Water Conservation Fund Expires, Jeopardizing Critical Work

“I will be pushing to get it included in any legislation that comes before the Senate”, said Sen.

“The Land and Water Conservation Fund is an elegant balancing of natural resource use with conservation”, Quigley said. “And they could literally be locked out of their next adventure”. “And it’s a shame that LWCF supporters in their party can’t convince them otherwise”. I would tell you that if there was a Democrat out there holding the Land and Water Conservation Fund up, we would have a very animated conversation.

The fund, created in 1965, is financed through royalties on offshore oil and gas drilling. Daines spoke out on the floor of the Senate Wednesday in clear terms, outlining what the LWCF means to Montana. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) to reauthorize the fund before the end of the government’s fiscal year. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said he would continue pressing colleagues for “robust” funding of LWCF money. When introducing it, Grijalva said, “Drawing out the uncertainty over the program’s funding every few years serves no one, especially when our constituents so strongly believe in the LWCF’s mission and value to the country”. “We can still do the right thing”.

“With LWCF set to expire today, it is long past time for Congress to act and reauthorize this important program”. A majority of Senators have declared support for permanent reauthorization of the fund. So have many in the House, Democrats and Republicans alike. As a result, the program has accumulated a $20 billion IOU, which Rep. Bishop cites as a reason not to continue funding it. But that money isn’t just lying around waiting to be spent, explains Mary Hollow, executive director of Montana-based Prickly Pear Land Trust, in the Helena Independent Record: “This is a paper account with nothing in it – there are only cobwebs”, she said. Do I think we can? Federal, state, local money – and landowner generosity – all have gone into preservation and recreation projects.

Painting a grim picture of Congress and its constant partisan gridlock, Tester said he was prepared to “raise a few heck” and play strong-arm politics with the Republican holdouts.

Conservative Republicans who oppose the LWCF do so on principle, saying it expands the federal government’s ownership of land.

“Public lands help form the identity of who we are as sportsmen and citizens,” said Newberg, who lives in Bozeman, Montana.

In Montana, the program’s benefits can not be understated, Tester said.

“These small businesses rely on it for public access to Montana’s treasured public lands, for outdoor recreation, which supports millions of dollars of revenue for our state and hundreds of jobs”, Daines said. “Once the program goes away it is a whole different fight”, he said. “For the state of Montana, it would be catastrophic”.

The program is about more than land acquisition, says Elizabeth Goldstein of the California State Parks Foundation. Thanks to the LWCF, visitors can enjoy areas in Mount Rainier; Redwood and Acadia National Parks; George Washington’s birthplace; Brown v. the Board of Education historic sites; Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and other national seashores; and countless wildlife refuges, management areas, and access points.