B and B

Christmas Mountains: Texas GOP still trying to sell off more public land

Our GOP administration in Texas continues its assault on the concept of public lands.  They haven't had much success lately, but they keep trying.  This time, it is Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, who for months has been doing his best to try to sell off 9,000+ acres of land out in the spectacular west Texas desert into private hands. 

This land, in the Christmas Mountains adjacent to Big Bend National Park, was donated to the state by a conservation group back in the early 1990s.  Once Patterson decided last year that it must be sold, the National Park Service stepped in to propose purchasing it and taking it off the state of Texas's hands.  But Patterson now appears to be refusing to consider the Park Service proposal.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has an update:

AUSTIN -- Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson continues to block a proposal that could put the Christmas Mountains into the hands of the National Park Service, conservationists complained this week.

Patterson, who is chairman of the School Land Board, which has authority over the Christmas Mountains, has so far declined to bring up for board consideration a park service proposal to add the mountains to Big Bend National Park.

Patterson, who drew criticism for his recent attempts to sell the property to private interests, raised eyebrows last week when he told an audience in Fort Worth that "Big Bend National Park doesn't want" the Christmas Mountains.

Conservationist Luke Metzger likened Patterson's stance to "blocking democracy."

"To prevent the proposal from at least being considered -- I think that's outrageous," said Metzger, director of Environment Texas. "It's a failure of government for him to not to even allow the case from being made to the full land board."

The three-member board has met three times since the federal agency made its proposal Jan. 31, and another meeting is scheduled for March 18. The park service's proposed management plan for the Christmas Mountains has not been put on any of the meeting agendas.

A spokesman for Patterson did not respond to questions about the land commissioner's plans. However, in a statement that he posted this week on the Star-Telegram's PoliTex blog, Patterson indicated that he did not want to transfer the property to the park service -- at least for the moment -- and that he is still considering selling the mountains to a private bidder, which he has said can act as a good steward of the property.

For more on the Christmas Mountains story, see jobsanger and Capitol Annex.

Real versus fake forest fire protection

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, reminds us not to be taken in by the predictable propaganda that emanates from the logging industry and their pawns in the Congress and the Bush Interior Department after every single major fire episode in the western U.S. (emphasis added)

[C]ommunities at South Lake Tahoe have been devastated by the Angora Wildland Fire which has scorched 2,500 acres and destroyed more than 200 buildings. The Tahoe basin's forests, overgrown from decades of well-intentioned fire suppression, need to be thinned of small trees and brush, particularly in the vicinity of homes in the urban-wildland interface. Climate change and beetle infestations have exacerbated the problem. While many good projects have gone forward, the problem is huge and much work remains to be done.

So, what has been the response of the timber industry's allies in Congress and in the media? Blame environmentalists. Senator Larry Craig announced that the problem was resistance in local communities to clearing out this brush. "We tried and weren't allowed to, and they lost their homes," Craig said. "I don't know if I want to smile, or I want to cry." The Lahontan Valley News claimed that the problem was the Sierra Club's opposition to logging on the national forests -- as if we had blocked timber sales in the back yards of Tahoe homeowners. Homeowners in one Tahoe subdivision claimed the problem was the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

The reality is simple -- and tragic. It costs money to clean brush, thin understory, remove downed wood and eliminate fire dangers around homes. Senator Craig has repeatedly rejected appeals by the Sierra Club to make such community protection zones the first priority for the Forest Service budget -- and the overwhelming bulk of the Forest Service funding still goes to subsidizing timber activities in the back country, far from homes, or fighting fires when it is too late. Very little goes to community protection, and the Forest Services continues to battle to cut down the remaining, fire-resistant, old-growth forests. As long as that continues to be true, there will be a fire next time. If we want to end these tragedies, we need to invest more in stopping them than we do in encouraging them. It's that simple, but the Ministry of Truth would like to tell us that spending our money miles from communities is the way to protect them.

Bush has trashed our public lands and the agencies that administer them

Timothy Egan, author of "The Worst Hard Time," an excellent account of those who lived through the 1930s Dust Bowl which I read last summer, has an essay in The New York Times describing Bush's public lands legacy.  The article--"This Land Was My Land"--is behind the subscription firewall, but here is an excerpt:

“In the national forests, big money was not king,” wrote [Gifford] Pinchot [the first head of the Forest Service, back in the early 1900s]. The Forest Service was beloved, he said, because “it stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government bureau had done before.”

A century later, I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.

In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line — the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.

Remember the scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when Jimmy Stewart’s character sees what would happen to Bedford Falls if the richest man in town took over? All those honky-tonks, strip joints and tenement dwellings in Pottersville?

If Roosevelt roamed the West today, he’d find some of the same thing in the land he entrusted to future presidents. The national wildlife system, started by T.R., has been emasculated. President Bush has systematically pared the budget to the point where, this year, more than 200 refuges could be without any staff at all.

The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees some of the finest open range, desert canyons and high-alpine valleys in the world, was told early on in the Bush years to make drilling for oil and gas their top priority. A demoralized staff has followed through, but many describe their jobs the way a cowboy talks about having to shoot his horse.

In Colorado, the bureau just gave the green light to industrial development on the aspen-forested high mountain paradise called the Roan Plateau. In typical fashion, the administration made a charade of listening to the public about what to do with the land. More than 75,000 people wrote them — 98 percent opposed to drilling.

Bush and his administration have trashed our public lands in the name of enriching their friends.  How can we ensure that this does not happen again?

Bush's public land sale dies in Congress for second year in a row

The U.S. Senate, by a vast majority earlier this week, said no to President Bush's proposal to sell off hundreds of thousands acres of the public's land.  They did this by approving an alternate scheme for funding rural counties' schools.  (That was Bush's trumped-up rationale.)  So for the second year in a row, Bush's privatization scheme is dead.

WASHINGTON, DC, March 28, 2007 (ENS) – The Senate today approved a bipartisan plan to extend payments to rural counties affected by declining revenues from logging on federal lands. The plan would provide money to more than 700 counties in 39 states.

Agreed to by a vote of 75-22, the plan was added as an amendment to the $122 billion emergency spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some $425 million of the $5 billion package will be paid for with emergency spending included in the bill, with the remainder funded by closing a series of yet to be identified tax loopholes.

The plan is "a lifeboat to keep rural communities afloat," said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and cosponsor of the amendment.

The plan provides $2.8 billion to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act through 2011 as well as $1.9 billion for the Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program, which provides money to state and local governments for loss of tax revenues from federal lands in their state.

The Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act, passed in 2000 with broad bipartisan support, guaranteed payments to eligible rural counties for public education and transportation projects.

The law was enacted because of declining timber sales on federal lands - the affected counties had historically received 25-50 percent of timber receipts from U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands.

"This is not some kind of welfare program. These are not handout payments," Wyden told colleagues. "This is part of a 100 year deal that came about when the federal forest system was created."

Money from the program has been used to support more than 4,400 schools, help maintain road systems and fund law enforcement in rural counties, but it expired in September 2006.

...

The Senate must reconcile the plan with the House of Representatives, which only included a one-year $400 million extension to the county payments program in its version of the emergency war spending bill. And President Bush has vowed to veto the spending package, largely due to objections over a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, said finding a long-term solution to the problem of rural county payments is critical.

"Our counties should not have to rely on emergency funding year after year and be faced with such uncertainty," Feinstein said. "We must provide our rural counties with a stable funding stream so that they are not in the same dire situation next year and can plan for the future."

Land sales are by nature one-time events and so are completely inappropriate as a long-term funding source for anything.  And, of course, selling off this country's heritage for a short-term money source is grossly negligent stewardship of the public's property. 

After seeing Bush's public land sell-off die last year, even when the GOP still controlled Congress, I knew it would go nowhere this year, in a Democratic congress.  Now, it appears to be official.

Will there be funding for new parks as Texas' population continues to grow?

One of the major ideas behind increasing our spending on Texas state parks above the starvation budget they have been on is to enable our state to acquire and develop new parks.  Maintaining the parks we have will not be enough to meet the needs of our state's growning population even into the near future.

But apparently, GOP state Rep. Warren Chisum, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee (and the same Chisum who was recently caught passing around  nonsensical anti-Copernican literature a few weeks ago), may not support this idea.  So Luke Metzger of Environment Texas claims in an email urging that parks supporters call our state representatives to urge them to ask Chisum to support funds for new parks.

Note that Chisum is one of the many, many co-sponsors of Rep. Hilderbran's bill to fully fund our parks system.  This fact emphasises, as Charles Kuffner recently pointed out, that Hilderbran's bill is only a partial solution--albeit a crucial first step.  We have to also make sure that the full amount of money actually gets appropriated--not just for this legislative session, but on into the future as well.

Otherwise, Texas' parks will continue to wither away, little by little. 

Bush trying again to sell off public lands

Amazingly, after getting thoroughly dumped on when they tried this last year, the Bush administration is once again proposing to sell off substantial amounts of our nation's public lands.

From the San Diego Union-Tribune yesterday:

For the second year in a row, the Bush administration has proposed selling off as much as 300,000 acres of national forests and other public land to help pay for rural schools and roads.

And for the second year, Western lawmakers and environmentalists blasted the plan, saying short-term gains would be offset by the permanent loss of the land.

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the new chairman of an Appropriations subcommittee that oversees environmental spending, pronounced the plan dead on arrival. “They are just not going to do this. It's not going to happen,” Dicks said Monday.

“We're going to find a way to fund the (rural) schools program without selling even one acre of public land,” added Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called the plan a “betrayal,” and said he would “work around the clock ... to convince Congress to act honorably and fulfill the federal obligation to our rural counties.”

Once again, former timber lobbyist, Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, is serving as Bush's point man on this plan. Once again, he is lying by claiming that no one has come up with a better idea to fund the rural schools in question.

For some background on last year's proposal, which faded away after receiving essentially no support amongst either the public or Congress, see these old posts of mine:

• New public lands sell-off proposed by GOP: Feb 11, 2006
• The trumped up rationale to privatize public land: Feb 12, 2006
• Point man on Bush's public lands sale beholden to real estate developer: Feb 13, 2006
• Some details on the Bush public land sale emerge: Feb 20, 2006
• GOP Senator vows to kill Bush's public land sell-off: Feb 21, 2006
• Montanans take their public land seriously: Feb 25, 2006
• Ultimate goal of privatizing public lands: Mar 2, 2006
• More opposition to Bush's "sneaker" public lands sale: Mar 22, 2006
• Bush's public land sale sputters along: Mar 30, 2006

Last year's sell-off, clearly on its last legs by the end of March, was officially put out of its misery over the summer. Now, Bush and Rey have brought it back from the dead with a few cosmetic changes.

The rhetoric is unchanged, however. Here is a quote from Mark Rey from the last post above, a post which outlined a specific alternative proposal from Senators Baucus and Wyden for funding rural schools "by withholding taxes from payments by the Federal government for goods and services delivered by public contractors at a rate of three percent of the payment amount" At that time, Rey said, "We're open to alternatives, but nary another alternative has emerged." I asked, rhetorically, "What will his tune be tomorrow?"

Over ten months later, his tune is precisely the same. The Durango Herald reports today: "Rey said he was open to hearing about other funding mechanisms for helping rural communities, but the plan's critics had offered none."

Fortunately, Democrats now control Congress, so we have real hope that an alternative along the lines of the one Baucus and Wyden proposed last year will actually emerge as legislation.

Speaker Craddick supports state parks -- Lt Gov Dewhurt not so much

The latest on the action (or inaction) on state parks in the Texas legislature:

• Last week, House Speaker Tom Craddick expressed his support for fully funding the parks system via the entire amount of the sales tax on sporting goods (via Capitol Annex and Eye on Williamson). This did not come as a surprise, since, as I wrote about earlier, six of the seven people Craddick assigned to the committee considering the bill that accomplishes this are co-authors—and the chair, Harvey Hilderbran of Kerrville, is the primary author.
• Meanwhile, Hilderbran's bill to fully fund state parks, HB6, is up to 104 co-authors, including 52 Republicans and 52 Democrats. After Democrat Ruth McClendon of San Antonio signed on today, the only central Texas representatives missing are Dems Robert Puente of San Antonio (southeastern Bexar County) and Mark Strama of Austin (northeastern Travis County).
• Despite the overwhelming support for parks in the Texas House, the leader of the Texas Senate, GOP Lieutanant Governor David Dewhurst, following in the footsteps of Governor Rick Perry, has expressed reservations about fully funding our parks, saying an extra $25 million is all they can handle. Parks director Walt Dabney, via the outdoors columnist of the Austin American-Statesman, strongly disagrees:

  "If that's all the money that's coming," Dabney said, referring to the $25 million figure, "we can fix some things but we can't run it. It makes no sense to fix something but not take care of it."

  Dabney laid out the department's legislative request for annual money above the current $56 million parks budget that would be needed to get the system back to a competitive level with other states:

  •$23 million for full- and part-time staff, operating expenses and equipment replacement.
  •$2 million to add staff to plan for road and building repair and replacement.
  •$25 million to restore historical sites and parks that have been allowed to decline because of a lack of funding. There is a $400 million backlog of identified repairs and restoration projects, Dabney said.
  •$7 million to add acreage and facilities to existing state parks. Many parks need group shelter sites and new bathrooms, as well as adjacent available acreage that would make them more usable and attract more visitors. "Those things would expand the season for those parks and increase the money those parks bring in," Dabney said.
  •$8 million to add four new parks, which have been called for in the department's strategic plan. Those parks are to be acquired and developed close to the state's largest metropolitan centers.

  The department is seeking another $20 million in local parks funding. That appropriation has been decimated in recent sessions and currently stands at $5.5 million. Raising it back above $20 million per year would be a real boost to local parks construction and development, Dabney said.

How long will Gov. Perry and Lt. Gov. Dewhurst continue to resist restoring Texas parks to their full potential?

UPDATE (10:49 P.M.):  Is Perry finally on board?  It appears his list of "emergency legislation" that the legislature can consider early in the session includes the parks funding bill (via AP and Matt Glazer at Burnt Orange Report).

State parks bill goes to committee

The bill to fully fund Texas parks, HB6 by Harvey Hilderbran of Kerrville, has apparently been referred to the committee on Culture, Recreation, and Tourism in the Texas House. It is now up to 95 co-authors, including the addition of Trey Martinez Fischer from Bexar County, who was not on the list as of my post last week.

Examining Speaker Tom Craddick's recent committee appointments, I see that this committee is chaired by none other than Hilderbran, and has six co-authors amongst its seven members. So prospects for the parks funding bill look excellent—even better than excellent—in the Texas House.

But that's just part of the story.

The companion bill in the Texas Senate, SB252—recently filed by GOP Craig Estes of Wichita Falls—has been referred to the Finance Committee. That committee is chaired by a fellow that I am not familiar with—Steve Ogden of Bryan. His bio states that "Ogden has been in the oil and gas exploration business for 20 years and is currently president of Ogden Resources Corporation, an independent oil and gas company based in College Station."

Not knowing much else about Ogden or the other members of the Senate Finance committee, I am not sure what this means for the chances that Texas parks will receive the full funding that they so desperately need. If anyone else has insight on this, please pass it on.

Watch 'Texas Parks at Risk', new short film from Environment Texas

A group called Environment Texas has put together a short film, with actor Ethan Hawke, on the effects of the budgetary crisis in the Texas state parks system (via Charles Kuffner). They have screenings tonight in Dallas, Austin, and Houston (alas, none in San Antonio for some reason). Fortunately, even if you can't make one of the screenings, you can still watch the 7-minute film at the end of this post (via YouTube) or on their website.

State Rep. Hilderbran's bill to fully fund our parks (HB 6) is now up to 90 co-authors, including 42 Democrats and 48 Republicans. That is 60% of the entire Texas House.

The word "bipartisan" is vastly overused and mis-used these days, but this seems a rare situation where the word applies in a very meaningful sense. The co-authors include 61% of Texas House Dems and 59% of Texas House GOPers. Our neglected parks have strong backing all of a sudden, and that support shows no hint of a partisan tilt.

As far as Bexar County representatives go, 5 of the 8 Dems have signed on (Joaquin Castro, Joe Farias, David Leibowitz, Menendez, Mike Villareal), while both GOPers have (Frank Corte and Joe Straus). Missing so far are Dems Trey Martinez Fischer, Ruth McClendon, and Robert Puente.

With such strong support in the Texas House, passage there seems virtually assured (or so I would naively believe, at least). So what about the Texas Senate?

A bill identical to Hilderbran's full-funding bill was introduced in the Senate a week ago by GOP state senator Craig Estes of Wichita Falls (SB 252). I don't see any co-authors listed yet. Perhaps this new short film will help spur our state senators into action. Writing them a letter or two probably wouldn't hurt either.

Anglers speaking up for our parks

Gov. Perry's re-discovered reluctance to fully fund Texas state parks is drawing a reaction, wrote the Fort Worth Star-Telegram yesterday:

Charles Harkless, president of the Texas BASS Federation Nation, said most anglers would rather have their money go to parks improvements than rebates. Of greater concern to anglers is the neglected parks system and a state government that has taken money originally meant for parks and used it for other purposes, he said.

"There is concern that boat ramps need repairs, the bathrooms need repairs. ... Fishermen don't mind paying money for the parks service," said Harkless, contacted during a fishing tournament in Louisiana.

Meanwhile, Perry's aides try to "clarify" what he said last week:

"What the governor was saying was ... that the money that a tax brings in should not drive budget decisions," [Perry spokesman Robert] Black said. "Budget decisions should be driven by how much a state agency needs. ... We're going to have a debate during the legislative process, and the parks department needs to justify" its needs.

Where has Mr. Black been for the last few months? The needs of the parks system have been laid out in detail by Perry's own appointees to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, and their appointees to the State Parks Advisory Board, whose report came out last summer.

[Director of the Texas Coalition for Conservation, George] Bristol, who is also a member of the State Parks Advisory Board, said that panel heard testimony on numerous occasions from department officials who outlined where the extra money would go. "We felt comfortable that not only did they need the money, but that they could spend it wisely and in a fiscally prudent fashion," Bristol said.

Meanwhile, the number of co-authors of state Rep. Hilderbran's bill to fully fund Texas Parks (HB6) is up to 74. Counting Hilderbran himself, that is now exactly one-half of the Texas House. According to the Houston Chronicle's outdoors columnist, two years ago, a very similar bill from Hilderbran received the support of a mere 10 Texas House members.