PUBLIC LANDS: Congress passes largest wilderness, parks, development package since 2009
Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
E&E: December 12, 2014 at 5:24 PM
The Senate this afternoone voted 89-11 to pass a sweeping public lands package as part of the fiscal 2015 defense authorization bill, marking a major victory for wilderness and parks advocates, as well as several Western communities and oil and gas companies clamoring to develop federal lands.
The measure, which passed the House last week 300-119, now moves to President Obama's desk, where it is expected to be signed.
It stands as a major bipartisan breakthrough in a Congress that until now had struggled mightily to pass lands bills. Several bipartisan measures had languished for years, with some passing the House or Senate, creating a political pressure valve.
"We have been working on some of these public lands measures not for months, not for years but, in several instances, a decade," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the incoming chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who assembled the package along with Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and their counterparts on the House Natural Resources Committee over the past several weeks.
Senators who voted "no" were Democrats Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), and Sherrod Brown (Ohio); independent Bernard Sanders (Vt.); and Republicans Jim Risch and Mike Crapo of Idaho, Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Ky.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), and Ted Cruz (Texas).
Small-government Republicans blasted the package, saying it would add or expand more than a dozen new parks and saddle the National Park Service with new costs, while liberal environmental groups decried GOP measures that would convey sacred and ecologically rich public lands to private corporations.
Murkowski called it a "fair and balanced" package that "addresses both the need for conservation on the one end and economic development and jobs and prosperity on the other."
Prominent conservation groups cheered the bill's passage.
"There is some great stuff in here for land conservation, and there is some not so good stuff," said Mike Matz, director of U.S. public lands for the Pew Charitable Trusts. "And there's some stuff that's left out. That's for the next Congress."
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) railed against the lands package, calling it a fiscally reckless land lockup that should not be attached to a must-pass defense bill. He blasted the new park units -- and the parochial interest of politicians -- at a time when the National Park Service faces a $12 billion maintenance backlog.
"We're taking care of the politicians, but are we taking care of the parks?" Coburn said, holding a copy of a report he released in October 2013 calling for a moratorium on new parks (Greenwire, Oct. 29, 2013). "Most politicians up here don't have courage to vote against their state interests when it harms national interests."
Murkowski, who shares Coburn's concern over Interior Department maintenance backlogs and enlarging the federal estate, said the new historical parks in the bill have been formally studied and recommended for inclusion in the park system.
"It is critically important to recognize the local support that these park provisions have that will encourage economic development, tourism, recreation," she said.
ENR will use Coburn's report next Congress to implement "necessary reforms," Murkowski said.
Coburn today offered a motion to refer the House-passed National Defense Authorization Act to the Senate Armed Services Committee with instructions to strip out the 450-page lands package, but that motion died on a 18-82 vote.
The measure would designate nearly 250,000 acres of wilderness in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Washington state and Montana; withdraw hundreds of thousands of acres from mineral development; establish or expand more than a dozen national park units; and protect about 140 miles of rivers.
It would also allow the Bureau of Land Management to expedite oil and gas and grazing permits, promote a copper mine in Arizona on land some tribes consider sacred, and convey federal timberlands to an Alaska Native-owned corporation in the Tongass National Forest -- all major Republican priorities.
Murkowski scored a major win with inclusion of her bill S. 340, to convey roughly 70,000 acres of the Tongass National Forest to Sealaska Corp., mostly for logging.
The bill has long been opposed by environmental groups, Alaska sportsmen and some southeast Alaska residents, but it had been amended several times in recent years to promote the Obama administration's transition to second-growth logging. The administration in summer 2013 backed the bill.
Its inclusion was among the major concessions made to appease Republicans, including House leaders who have refused to pass pure conservation packages.
It's not unlike the 2009 omnibus public lands bill, which required Democrats to sign off on a Murkowski provision to allow approval of a road through an Alaska wilderness area.
Some environmentalists said concessions in NDAA were too great.
"I can be bought, but I'm not cheap," Andy Kerr, an environmental lobbyist, said last week. "Just putting some acres on the scoreboard at the cost of other lands is not a good way to behave."
