Interior releases $900M outdoors spending plan

In a Monday letter to the chairs and ranking members of the key appropriations and authorizing committees in the House and Senate, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt outlined how his agency plans to spend funds made available under the Great American Outdoors Act.

“This is an unprecedented funding commitment for recreation and conservation,” Bernhardt wrote.

Under the new law, the LWCF will receive permanent annual funding of $900 million, which is paid for with proceeds from offshore oil and gas drilling.

Funds from the program can be used to acquire land and water for the federal estate — including acquiring parcels to increase access to outdoor recreation, preserve historical or cultural sites and conserve wildlife habitat.

LWCF monies are also distributed to states via a grant program — with federal funds accounting for up to half of a project’s costs — to acquire new lands or waters and develop facilities for recreation.

According to Bernhardt’s missive, fiscal 2021 funding will dedicate $540 million to state grants, including $20 million for National Park Service “battlefield grants” and $25 million for Fish and Wildlife Service cooperative endangered species fund grants.

The remaining $360 million in funds will be divided among acquisition projects at land management agencies, with the bulk of funding going to the Forest Service.

Disappointment

But while the Forest Service will claim $100 million for additional land and water, it will also see $120 million for its Forest Legacy Program. The latter is technically a state grant program — and not federal land management funding — that aims to protect privately owned forestland through conservation easements or land purchases. The Forest Service website notes that it has acquired 2.6 million acres since 1990.

That designation irked conservation advocates, who accused the Trump administration of knowingly skirting federal law mandating that no less than 40% of LWCF money go to stateside grant programs and no less than 40% to federal land acquisitions (E&E Daily, Nov. 10).

John Gale, conservation director for Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, told E&E News that the substance of the new list, in addition to having missed the first reporting deadline, has sportsmen “questioning the administration’s commitment to implementing GAOA.”

Gale also noted that while Interior allocates $2.5 million to the Bureau of Land Management, all of the projects proposed in the agency’s preliminary LWCF priority list from back in April intended for sportsmen access “were axed.”

“Two of these were slated for Montana,” Gale continued, “and would have pushed $13.3 [million] into direct access enhancement for hunters and anglers.”

In the meantime, $140 million of the federal funds will be split among the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service, according to the list Bernhardt issued.

FWS would receive $75.5 million to address 20 projects across two dozen states.

No information is included beyond the names of the units, including the Cherry Valley National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Pennsylvania and water rights for the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, which straddles California and Oregon.

The Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation urged Bernhardt to fund the latter in September, warning that what was once a “vast natural lake and marsh is now in danger of reverting to desert.”

The foundation noted that it could cost up to $60 million to purchase senior water rights in the Klamath Basin to provide sufficient water to the nation’s original waterfowl refuge.

Other FWS sites listed by the Trump administration — such as Arkansas’ Cache River and Felsenthal national wildlife refuges and Louisiana’s Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge — match those in a deferred maintenance report the agency provided to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in mid-2019.

Another $50 million would go to NPS to fund more than two dozen projects, including one identified solely as the agency’s “battlefield parks.” The NPS website lists 39 sites — including Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park and the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland — in that category.

The list also includes the Vicksburg National Military Park across Louisiana and Mississippi.

Although she voted against the Great American Outdoors Act, Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) told The Vicksburg Post in July that fixing erosion-damaged roads at the park should be a top priority.

The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 245 million acres of public lands and another 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, would receive the smallest slice of funds, with just $2.5 million. Interior did not include a list of BLM projects.

Does it matter?

But congressional Democrats have indicated that the administration’s proposals could all be moot: New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich and Rep. Deb Haaland have both indicated that they could institute their own priorities for the fund, rather than the lame-duck administration’s.

“I’m disappointed, but in the end it’s not about me. It’s about the little girl who loses out on an opportunity to go fishing with her grandfather,” said Heinrich in a statement late last night responding to the new LWCF lists. “We were able to pass the Great American Outdoors Act by rising above politics. That’s exactly how it should be implemented.”

No new funding for LWCF projects in New Mexico was included in Interior’s priority list Monday.

The Great American Outdoors Act also established a five-year trust fund to address $20 billion worth of deferred maintenance projects at national parks and on public lands.

While the Trump administration submitted its fiscal 2021 list of 725 deferred maintenance projects to Congress last week, the $1.9 billion proposal likewise proved to be light on details (Greenwire, Nov. 3).

The Senate Appropriations Committee today likewise chided the Trump administration over that insubstantial proposal.

“The Committee is disappointed by the lack of specific bureau and project-level information contained in the submissions and believes additional details regarding proposed projects are necessary for Congress to exercise its right to modify the Administration’s proposal,” Senate appropriators wrote in a statement accompanying the Interior, environment and related agencies bill released today