The trail to popular Wallace Falls above Gold Bar, beach walks on Whidbey Island?s Keystone Spit, and boat trips to Long Island in Willapa Bay ? with the magic experience of watching elk emerge from mists and an ancient cedar forest ? have been made possible by a below-the-radar federal program.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which has pumped $462 million into saving places in Washington, will live or die depending on which or two rival budget proposals before Congress is adopted.
A plan offered by the Senate Budget Committee, chaired by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., would fund the LWCF to the tune of $900 million over the next 10 years.? The Fund gets money by taking a chunk of oil and gas revenues flowing into the federal treasury from leasing on public lands owned by American taxpayers.
But a budget offered by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, decimates conservation spending:? The LWCF has already taken an 80 percent cut that ?left barely any funding at all to do important conservation work,? said Alan Rowsome, director of conservation funding for The Wilderness Society.
Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., who retired in January, defended the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, and used money for such projects as the Mountains-to-Sound Greenway.
The LWCF helped put together the Mountains-to-Sound Greenway, creating multiple recreation opportunities along the I-90 corridor.? It paid to protect Protection Island, a famed bird rookery near Port Townsend that was targeted for real estate development.? Keystone Spit and Crockett Lake, just south of Coupeville ferry terminal, were similarly preserved.
Over the last three decades, the Fund had a key defender in Congress ? Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., a power on the House Appropriations Committee almost from the day he hit Congress in 1977.? But Dicks retired from Congress in January.
In 1981, President Reagan?s ultraconservative Interior Secretary James Watt tried to abolish the LWCF.? Dicks and Oregon Rep. Les AuCoin persuaded the Appropriations Committee to save the Fund.? An angry Watt called Dicks and threatened to fly to Tacoma and campaign against him.? Dicks, initially nervous, basked in adulation.
Watt was asked at a hearing, by Oregon Rep. Jim Weaver, whether we should preserve places for future generations.? The deeply evangelical Interior Secretary delivered a famous answer:??? ?I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.?
The newly elected, Republican-run ?Tea Party Congress? in 2011 tried to zero-out the Land and Water Conservation Fund.? Dicks rallied support and the LWCF survived on a 216-213 vote.? One state Republican, Rep. Dave Reichert, voted to preserve the fund.? Three other GOP House members from this state voted to axe it.
The anti-LWCF vote by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler was surprising, given her Southwest Washington district.? Money from the Fund ransomed (from Weyerhaeuser) 800 acres of ancient cedar forest on Long Island.? The LWCF made possible the Julia Butler Hansen National Wildlife Refuge, which preserved habitat for the endangered white tail deer along the Columbia River in Wahkaikum County.
Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., voted against the Land and Water Conservation Fund despite places preserved in her Southwest Washington district.
Dicks was honored Wednesday by Futurewise, the statewide conservation group that has sought to preserve farms, forests and beaches.
?We?ve had at least five or six major projects that the Fund made possible by the Fund,? said Dicks, speaking with particular pride of the Mountains to Sound Greenway.? He has been working with Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, in an effort to get LWCF money to help protect national parks from the impacts of budget sequestration.
?The parks have lost $136 million due to sequestration,? said Dicks.? (Olympic and Mt. Rainier National Parks have each lost more than $600,000 in already-stretched budgets.)
The Land and Water Conservation Fund will get little mention in news stories out of Washington, D.C.? It is, however, a big deal in this Washington.
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