By Dustin Howard, 11/10/15
Uncle Sam is the largest land owner
west of the Rockies, with 660,000,000 acres of land, an area of nearly ten times
the size of the United Kingdom. That accounts for 29 percent of the country’s landmass, and only grows with the federal
government amassing ever larger tracts of land.
The government already owns half of
the West. Really. One entity with so many other responsibilities cannot
efficiently manage such a large quantity of land.
For this reason, U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop
(R-Utah), Chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, has put forward
the Protecting America’s Recreation and
Conservation (PARC) Act for the purpose
of empowering states to better manage where the federal government has failed.
The PARC Act is a set of reforms to the Land and Water Conservation Fund
(LWCF), a Great Society era program that enables the federal mismanagement of
half the West.
Rep. Bishop said in a statement,
“The LWCF’s current lopsided funding ratio makes limited funds available to
establish recreation projects and facilities that can be responsibly managed
and maintained by State and local entities while continuing to vastly expand
the federal estate,” Bishop said. “Even more troubling on the federal side is
that the money is being spent with little transparency, scant oversight, and
minimal local input.”
While Rep. Bishop has acted to
reform LWCF, his legislation also seeks to restrict land acquisition by the
federal government, limiting the Obama Administration’s efforts purchase even
more land.
On the same day, Rep. Paul Gosar
(R-Ariz.) introduced H.R. 3946,
the Protecting Local Communities from Executive Overreach Act. The Act narrows
the scope of the Antiquities Act of 1906 to prevent this and future Presidents
from acting unilaterally in seizing certain lands to be designated as
“monuments”. The President’s monuments are designed to restrict the economic
activity that his vested interests have fought for years.
According
to Gosar, President Obama seized 1.25 million acres of land, with another 1.7 million
acres in jeopardy. The legislation specifically requires the federal government
to attain community consent before action, and limits the parcels to 5,000
acres. This prevents the federal government from robbing states of their
autonomy and crippling economic activity that creates jobs and tax revenue.
The two acts are complimentary of
each other, and attempt to rectify the shameless legacy building President
Obama is doing at the expense of Western Americans, who suffer this and other
economic hardships as a result. Massive amounts of natural resources remain out
of reach because the President is repaying campaign pledges to
environmentalists. These very environmentalists rely on the same minerals,
timber and agriculture that everybody else relies on, but this precludes many
in the West from benefiting from their own resources.
Pursuing both bills as a unified
policy sends the message that we can maintain conservation efforts and natural
treasures without locking the U.S. into artificial scarcity. Ultimately, states
should be given control of the lands within their borders, where environmental
concerns can be balanced with economic ones.
State governments have long accepted
the transfer
of lands from federal control to state control. Local considerations can better
determine their own interests in purposing land. The unified pursuit of both
bills, as well as transferring more land to the states would ensure that true
conservationism could occur, while addressing the needs of the communities that
are impacted.
Fortunately, Congress may have the
opportunity in the weeks ahead to prevent future land grabs by including a
rider by Gosar and Bishop. The upcoming omnibus federal government funding bill
provides the perfect opportunity for Congress to rein in the President on this
important issue, and reassert its Article One power of the purse.
Dustin Howard is a contributing
editor for the Americans for Limited Government.
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