To: Reporters and Interested Parties
From: Jesse Prentice-Dunn, Policy Director, Center for Western Priorities
Re: What Sen. Murkowski and Rep. Bishop get wrong about dedicated funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund
This morning, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a full committee markup on H.R. 3195, a bill that would establish full, dedicated funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will follow, with a full committee hearing scheduled for next week on implementing the conservation program. Created in 1965 and funded by offshore oil and gas royalties, LWCF has proven to be America’s most important parks and public lands conservation program.
Congress has chronically underfunded the Land and Water Conservation Fund, only twice appropriating the full $900 million authorized annually for the program and frequently appropriating less than half. Although more than $40 billion has accrued in the Land and Water Conservation Fund since it was established in 1964, only $18 billion has been appropriated. A few months ago, Congress voted with bipartisan support to reauthorize the program but failed to provide any dedicated funding. Now a bipartisan group of lawmakers is calling for full, dedicated funding to ensure the program can implement conservation projects. While the program enjoys broad bipartisan support, the group of lawmakers faces perplexing opposition from some House and Senate lawmakers over dedicated funding.
Chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Senator Lisa Murkowski, and the Ranking Member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Representative Rob Bishop, both recently voted to reauthorize LWCF, and yet both have expressed resistance to ensuring dedicated funding for the program. Conversely, both lawmakers support legislation that would create dedicated funding for Interior maintenance backlog in national parks from FY2020 through FY2024, along with Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. Their reasoning: “We’re just not going to be able to get on top of the maintenance backlog unless we do something that is dedicated.”
In recent years, federal land management agencies have proposed hundreds of conservation and recreation projects that are identified as “priority” projects and requested funding through LWCF. However, due to a lack of appropriated funds, many of those projects remain incomplete. From 2014 to 2017, more than $530 million worth of LWCF federal public lands projects were not completed, in part due to a lack of appropriations. Every year that Congress falls short of full, dedicated funding, a backlog of conservation and recreation projects builds.
Land managers need long-term certainty to meet the conservation and recreation needs that remain outstanding in our parks and public lands. Full, dedicated funding for LWCF would provide land managers with the ability to avoid the uncertainty of fluctuating annual appropriations and plan for outstanding projects and future conservation funding needs. By Murkowski and Bishop’s logic, we just aren’t going to be able to get on top of the backlog of critical conservation projects without full, dedicated funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund.