Crazy (and exciting) week for LWCF and public lands deferred maintenance

Well, it’s been an interesting week. If you’ve been following along here for any length of time, you’ve heard us talking, probably ad nauseum at this point, about the importance of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which uses a portion of royalties from offshore oil and gas leasing to pay for conservation and recreation priorities. After an unnecessarily protracted fight, LWCF was permanently reauthorized last spring in the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, thanks in large part to outreach from the outdoor community

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But, because everything has to happen the hard way, that still doesn’t actually guarantee that any money collected for LWCF gets expended for the purposes it was collected for. That decision gets made every year in the appropriations process, and Congress habitually fails to actually spend the $900 million allotted to the fund each year (typically spending about half that). So, for the past year (really much longer, but who’s counting), we’ve been working to support legislation to provide dedicated funding for LWCF, meaning that the money goes to LWCF projects without giving Congress the opportunity to skim off the top for other purposes.

At the same time, there has been a long, ongoing conversation about how to address the deferred maintenance needs of our country’s land management agencies, in particular the National Park Service, which has a backlog of approximately $20 billion.

These two needs have become intertwined in the congressional conversation, largely because of the not-entirely-ingenuous argument that we shouldn’t be acquiring new lands with LWCF money when we aren’t spending enough to maintain what's already in the federal estate.

This conversation—fully funding LWCF and addressing deferred maintenance—has been holding at a low simmer for the past year or so.

And then, this week, the President tweeted about it:

This is a somewhat surprising turn of events given that the President’s budget—released just last month—proposed to virtually zero out LWCF spending entirely.

Where is this coming from? Well, as you might have remarked, the President’s tweet tags two Republican Senators, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana, both of whom are in tough re-election fights in very pro-public-lands states. Those Senators feel that it's key to their political survival that they bring home some goods for the outdoor recreation and conservation communities, and the President very much would like to do those two gentlemen a solid in that regard.

Now, before you get too cynical about this, consider the bigger picture here: the outdoor recreation community, working alongside the conservation community, hunters and anglers, and others, have raised the profile of this issue to the point that two Republican Senators feel like delivering on our priorities is essential for their re-election chances, and the President and his advisors agree. That is a huge accomplishment for our community, and something we should be really stoked about.

What’s next? Next week, Sens. Gardner, Daines, Manchin, and Warner are planning to introduce the Great American Outdoors Act, comprising S. 1081, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Permanent Funding Act and S. 500, the Restore Our Parks Act, which addresses deferred maintenance for the National Park Service.

This is exciting. And—behold the power of a tweet—it appears likely that this is going to be on the Senate floor very shortly thereafter.

Now, there is one BIG important thing that needs to happen between now and then. At the moment, the deferred maintenance bill slated for inclusion, ROPA, only addresses the needs of the Park Service. We have a huge opportunity right now to make sure that this bill also addresses the needs of the other land management agencies, especially the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, which are arguably even more important for outdoor recreation than National Parks. The Forest Service, for example, has deferred maintenance needs in excess of $5 billion (NPS’s maintenance backlog is $20 billion), and it manages more than 156,000 miles of trails, dwarfing the Park Service.

It’s still possible that this addition could be made before the bill is introduced, and also possible that there may need to be an amendment once the bill is on the Senate floor. Either way, it’s really important that Senators hear from you now about 1) your support for this package, and 2) the importance of addressing deferred maintenance for land management agencies beyond NPS. Can you take a minute today to ask your Senator to support permanent funding for LWCF, funding for deferred maintenance on our public lands, and addressing the needs of the Forest Service, BLM, and more?

We’ve made it easy to do below...