PUBLIC LANDS: Will budget blueprints seek to dispose of federal estate?
Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
E&E News: Tuesday, March 17, 2015
House and Senate Republicans this week are set to unveil their fiscal 2016 budget blueprints, setting up a potential battle over the sale or disposal of federal lands.
House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) earlier this year urged House budget leaders to "eliminate barriers" so that federal lands can be conveyed to state, local and tribal governments "without strings."
"The federal government would save significant management, maintenance, and repair costs," Bishop wrote in a letter to Budget Committee leaders. "The better economic use of the land would generate not only state and local tax income, but federal income as well."
Bishop's plan is backed by some Western conservatives and free-market advocates. They argue that the federal government's roughly 640 million acres of lands are an economic drag on rural communities that cannot tax them and that have limited say in whether they are developed for oil and gas, minerals, logging or grazing.
But Democrats and conservation and sportsmen's groups are vigorously opposing the disposal of federal lands, fearing that states would manage them primarily for commodity development or sell them to the highest bidder to balance their own budgets.
The House and Senate budget resolutions, while nonbinding, could offer insight into how the GOP-controlled 114th Congress will address the federal estate.
The House's fiscal 2014 budget resolution, for example, touted a bill by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) to require the Interior Department to sell about 3.4 million acres of Western public lands to the highest bidder, a move aimed at reducing the federal deficit and promoting economic development.
The House's fiscal 2015 budget resolution supported "examining federal land to see where cost savings can be achieved by selling unneeded acreage in the open market -- excluding National Parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, and wild and scenic rivers."
"There is a strong likelihood that Rep. Bishop's request will be included in the House GOP's budget, thanks to intensive lobbying efforts by a handful of right wing politicians and special interest groups," Claire Moser, a research and advocacy director with the Center for American Progress' public lands project, wrote in a blog post yesterday. "Whether Rep. Bishop's proposal makes it into the House GOP budget or not, the congressman has made it clear that disposing of national forests and public lands will be one of his top priorities as chair."
Normally, when Congress sheds federal lands, it must find a fiscal offset for the projected loss of oil and gas, logging or grazing revenues to the U.S. Treasury. Bishop argued that if a local government or a tribe wants to manage the land and assume the liability risks, "it should be entitled to the income generated by those efforts."
He urged budget leaders to allow land conveyances to begin "immediately" by building $50 million into the budget to cover possible impacts on offsetting receipts.
The federal government would save on long-term management, maintenance and repair costs, and there would be less need for other taxpayer-funded programs that aid counties with large blocks of federal lands -- such as payments in lieu of taxes or Secure Rural Schools, Bishop argued.
But committee Democrats are slamming the plan.
"The majority is trying to bake this ill-conceived and wildly unpopular idea into the federal budget process," committee Democrats led by ranking member Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) wrote in a Feb. 20 letter to Budget Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) and ranking member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). "While some states might toy with the idea that the federal government 'stole' the lands, hundreds of millions of Americans pay for and enjoy these public lands and waters, most of which have been in federal ownership since before Utah and other western states existed."
Robert Dillon, spokesman for Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), said he was unaware of whether Murkowski was proposing a similar plan to Senate budget leaders. He declined to provide a copy of the committee's views and estimates on the president's fiscal 2016 budget.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the federal government currently owns roughly 640 million acres, most of it in the West and managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service. The government owns nearly half of Western lands, but 4 percent of the rest of the Lower 48 states.
Since 1990, land ownership by those agencies and the Department of Defense has declined by more than 18 million acres as a result of acquisitions and disposals, CRS said.
Many Republicans remain opposed to the purchase of new federal lands, given that land management agencies face deferred maintenance backlogs totaling roughly $20 billion. The House's last budget resolution proposed amending the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act so that a majority of the proceeds from federal lands sales would go to deficit reduction rather than the purchase of private inholdings as the law originally prescribed.
"The fact is that the federal government owns far more land than it can adequately maintain," said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. "The environmental condition of much federal land ranges from poor to disgraceful."
But Adam Kolton, vice president of national advocacy for the National Wildlife Federation, said most Americans want federal lands kept in the public domain. In the past year, hunters and fishermen have mobilized in statehouses and in Washington, D.C., to oppose proposals to transfer federal lands, he said.
The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership in January announced that it and more than a dozen other sporting and conservation groups -- including the National Wild Turkey Federation, Trout Unlimited and Backcountry Hunters & Anglers -- were forming a coalition called Sportsmen's Access as a grass-roots effort to work to persuade lawmakers not to transfer federal lands to the states.
"This scheme to take over public lands is awakening a sleeping giant," Kolton said. "It's incredibly unpopular, financially risky and politically questionable."
While proposals to dump federal lands likely would not be able to pass the Senate, where Democrats can block bills using a filibuster, Kolton said it is possible that House and Senate budget leaders could utilize a special procedural shortcut known as reconciliation that allows legislation to move through the upper chamber with a simple majority.
A "reconciliation directive" in a budget resolution would require committees of jurisdiction to produce legislation by a specific date that meets certain spending or tax targets, according to a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "The Budget Committee then packages all of these bills together into one bill that goes to the floor for an up-or-down vote, with limited opportunity for amendment," the center said.
But Senate rules prohibit reconciliation from being used for legislation that would increase the deficit, and House rules forbid its use to increase mandatory spending, the center said.
Kolton said budget leaders could send instructions to the House Natural Resources or Senate Energy and Natural Resources committees to author legislation to raise revenue to meet budget targets through more drilling or selling public lands.
"We're going to be watching closely to see if the budget opens the door to this kind of attack," he said. "In some ways, it would be shocking."
