Lame Duck a dud for LWCF… but progress was made..much work ahead !!
The following are summaries of several late assessments of the effort to get a LWCF re-authorization into the last minute deliberations of Congress. The outcome is that it WAS NOT authorized.. BUT.. a commitment seems to be made by the Leadership to bring it up again after the first of the year. However, maintaining a 40% guarantee for the state share may be vulnerable.. NASORLO will work with it’s partners to develop strategy for moving forward to see if we can sustain the momentum created in Dec. for LWCF and a state equitable share. DKE
The latest Dec. 21
LWCF was included in a larger public lands package, which died in the Senate last night. The four big negotiators in the House and Senate had come to consensus on LWCF language which included a floor of 40 percent for state funds and permanent reauthorization. It was packaged with smaller public lands bills that had passed in Senate and House committees this Congress. Unfortunately, Sen. Lee of Utah opposed a request for unanimous consent to move the bill, siting that it did not include an exemption for Utah from the antiquities act and that he did not have enough time to review it. His obstructionism is not condoned by the Governor or other elected officials in Utah. Sen. Cantwell has said that leaders McConnell and Schumer are committed to bring this back to the Senate floor in the first week or two of January, at the beginning of the new Congress. However, there are questions about how the bill may change or if it will need to be renegotiated at that time based on change of power. We will continue to monitor this and keep you all in the loop.
See you in January: Senate Energy Chairman Lisa Murkowski’s bid to pass a broad western public lands bill, including a permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, came up short thanks to an objection from Sen. Mike Lee, but she won a commitment from Senate leaders to take it up as one of the first orders of business in the new Congress. “This will be an opportunity to study every single page that you want because you’ll have an opportunity to vote on this thumbs up or thumbs down when we return in January,” she said on the floor. Murkowski said she made “some significant offers” but they were summarily rejected by Lee and others despite the broad bipartisan support for the underlying lands package. Murkowski said 43 members of the chamber had at least one provision in the package.
What happened: After the chamber cleared the short-term CR, Murkowski asked consent to pass the lands package but Lee objected, citing the fact he’d just seen the 600-plus page bill earlier that morning and that Utah was treated unfairly in the measure. “This hurts,” he said of the bill’s impact to his state. “Why are we just receiving this just now?” Lee has objected to any permanent reauthorization of LWCF for months. “I don’t believe it was a coincidence that I wasn’t informed” that a permanent LWCF provision was included in the bill, Lee said.
Republican friendly fire: Sen. Cory Gardner said the Senate offered Lee a chance to address his concerns through votes Wednesday. “I’m pretty doggone upset about this,” he said, pounding his fist on his Senate desk. “Why can’t we have a vote? Why can’t we let people who don’t like [LWCF], vote no. People who like it, vote yes.”
Quotable: House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop isn’t sure about a land package’s path to passage in the House as a stand-alone bill, as Pro’s Anthony Adragna reports. “I know packages are dumb. They’re bad but it’s going to be worse next year. We won’t get as much. We’ll get more stuff we don’t like next year,” he said. “I’m not holding up what I have just because I don’t get everything that I wanted to originally.”
Grijalva: House Democrats will seek changes to lands package
House Democrats want to make changes to a bipartisan lands bill when Congress returns to the issue next year, incoming Natural Resources Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said Thursday. A package that stalled in the Senate would permanently reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, among other items, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO. But after conservative Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) blocked the bill Wednesday night, senior Republicans said they would return to the legislation in January. By then, Democrats will be in the House majority, giving them an opportunity to reshape some of its provisions. “We had to bite some bullets in negotiating and maybe concede on some points that we don’t have to concede about anymore,” Grijalva told reporters in the Capitol.
Grijalva said he wanted to vote on LWCF reauthorization and certain parochial lands bills that enjoyed broad support, but remove more controversial measures from the package. He did not provide specifics, but Democrats have objected to provisions they say could weaken protections for threatened and endangered species. Outgoing Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), who supports the existing deal, predicted just such an outcome before Lee torpedoed the bill in the Senate Wednesday night. “I know packages are dumb,” Bishop said earlier Wednesday. “They’re bad but it’s going to be worse next year. We won’t get as much. We’ll get more stuff we don’t like next year.”
Republicans and conservation groups are furious with Lee, who broke with retiring-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Bishop. A House GOP aide said the package includes at least 10 bills specific to Utah. “When you have Senator Hatch and Rob Bishop and conservation organizations all on one side of things, it begs the question what could Mike Lee have had an issue with,” said Jonathan Asher, senior representative for government relations at the Wilderness Society. “We’re very frustrated with his move.” Lee has for months resisted a permanent reauthorization to the Land and Water Conservation Fund. He expressed frustration on the floor Wednesday the bill was crafted in private — he said he only obtained a copy that morning from a lobbyist — and insisted on modifications to the Antiquities Act that would benefit Utah. “There a whole lot of these [provisions] that the chairman and ranking member know darn well that I oppose,” Lee said. “They’ve known for weeks, if not weeks, that they were putting permanent LWCF reauthorization in this bill. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that I was not informed of this.”
