Copyright 1999 Federal News Service, Inc.
Federal News Service
MARCH 10, 1999, WEDNESDAY
SECTION: IN THE NEWS
LENGTH:
2483 words
HEADLINE: PREPARED TESTIMONY OF MALCOLM
WALLOP
CHAIRMAN, FRONTIERS OF FREEDOM
BEFORE THE HOUSE
COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
SUBJECT - H. R. 701, THE CONSERVATION AND
RE-INVESTMENT
ACT AND H. R. 798, THE PERMANENT PROTECTION FOR AMERICA'S
RESOURCES 2000 ACT
BODY:
Chairman Young,
thank you for inviting Frontiers of Freedom to testify today on these important
issues. My name is Malcolm Wallop, and I am chairman of Frontiers of Freedom.
From 1977 until 1995, I represented Wyoming in the Senate, where I served on the
Energy and Natural Resources Committee. As a rancher near Big Horn, Wyoming, I
have a lifetime's experience of private stewardship and of federal land
management practices. I founded Frontiers of Freedom to defend the
constitutional rights of all Americans and to restore constitutional limits on
government at all levels.
Frontiers of Freedom opposes enactment of the
Conservation and Re- investment Act, the Permanent Protection for America's
Resource's 2000 Act, and other similar proposals, such as the Clinton-Gore
Administration's Lands Legacy Initiative. While my remarks
today are directed at H.R. 701, most of them apply just as well to H. R. 798 and
the Lands Legacy program.
Before discussing our objections to the bill, I
would like to urge you, Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the committee
to hold extensive field hearings before you proceed to mark-up. This is major
legislation, which would have serious consequences far into the future for a
great many people. But from what I could see from the witness list released last
Friday, nearly all the witnesses at these hearings represent institutions that
would be financial beneficiaries of this legislation. I really don't think you
need two days of hearings to find out that those who are to receive large sums
of money from the federal treasury are generally in favor of it.
There are
people all across the country, however, who will be the targets rather than the
beneficiaries of H. R. 701. It seems to me that you should at least listen to
them. In 1988 when this committee considered similar legislation, Chairman
Udall's American Heritage Trust Act, Representative Vento's subcommittee heard
testimony from a number of prominent opponents who have not been invited to
testify at these hearings, I therefore urge you to hold field hearings, not in
places such as Louisiana that stand to gain hundreds of millions of dollars a
year from Title I, but in places where you can hear from people whose
livelihoods and ways of life may be destroyed by enactment of H. R. 701. In
particular, I hope you will travel to the Northern Forests of Maine, upstate New
York, New Hampshire, and Vermont, which are now under assault by the
preservationists; and to an area in the West, such as my own State of Wyoming,
where the committee can learn about the negative environmental and economic
consequences of massive government land ownership.
Frontiers of Freedom
agrees that revenues from Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas production should
be shared with the States. However, we believe that it should be shared only
with the States that actually have OCS production off their shores and in the
same way that revenues from onshore federal leases are shared with those States
in which they are located--that is, fifty-fitly. We urge you to introduce
legislation that would do that in a straightforward way and would
enthusiastically support your efforts to pass such a bill. The method that H. R.
701 adopts is in our view much less satisfactory because it will send much less
money to the six OCS States than the 50% that they should be receiving and
because the funds distributed will be earmarked for a specific purpose rather
than going into the States' general treasuries.
These shortcomings are
insignificant compared to the way H. R. 701 ties OCS revenue sharing to a
massive increase in government acquisition of private land. Simply put,
Frontiers of Freedom believes that the land acquisition provisions are much too
high a price to pay for any benefits the bill may contain.
I have noticed
that H. R. 701's proponents, when they have mentioned it at all, have downplayed
the magnitude of land acquisitions mandated in Title II. Thus proponents have
claimed that the 378 million dollars per year for federal land acquisition is
only 50 or 60 million dollars per year higher than the historic average for Land
and Water Conservation Fund acquisitions appropriated by Congress. Further, they
seem to assume that state and local acquisitions are somehow more acceptable to
private property owners. And they suggest that because the $378 million per year
for state and local acquisitions can be spent on development projects, it
therefore will be spent mostly on development projects.
If only this line of
obfuscation were true. The fact is that H. R. 701 would vastly increase the rate
of socialization of private land in this country. Title II turns the Land and
Water Conservation Fund into a dedicated fund--that is, not subject to further
congressional appropriation. Twenty-three percent of OCS revenues would be
deposited into the fund up to the authorized level of $900 million per year. Of
this $900 million, $378 million would go to the four federal land agencies for
land acquisition and $378 million to the States (of which 50% would then be
distributed to local governments) for land acquisition and related development
costs.
Two key facts are regularly not mentioned by H. R. 701's supporters.
First, the bill would require that all federal funds for state and local
acquisitions be matched fifty-fifty by state and local governments. This means
that the total available for buying land is twice times $378 million, or $756
million per year. The leveraging of federal grants in this way is designed to
make it very attractive for state and local governments to spend a lot of money
buying private land, regardless of what their taxpayers might think.
Add
this $756 million to the $378 million for federal acquisitions for a grand total
of $1.134 billion per year for land acquisition. But this is not all. The second
fact not mentioned by the bill's proponents is that Title I funds can also be
spent on buying land. According to the committee's own projections, Title I
would distribute $1.24 billion in FY 2000 to the 34 "coastal States." It is
likely that a large chunk of this money will be used to buy land.
As
evidence, I would point to the fate of the Exxon Valdez trust fund. At the time
that Exxon agreed to put $900 million into a fund to remediate the harmful
environmental effects of the oil spill, few people thought that a lot of the
money would be used to buy land. Yet, this is precisely what has happened.
According to Senator Frank Murkowski, to date $380 million from the trust fund
has been used to buy over 700,000 acres of private land, some of it far removed
from Prince William Sound. Senator Murkowski recently complained that the trust
had purchased 16% of the private land in Alaska "and they aren't done yet."
There is an obvious reason why federal, state, and local land management
agencies like to buy land. It increases the size of their empires, which leads
to increases in agency budgets and staffs.
Thus I conclude that several
hundred millions of dollars per year from Title I will likely be spent on land
acquisition. This could well bring the total from Titles I and II to over $1.5
billion per year. This would represent approximately a five-fold increase in
funds for land acquisition over the historic average of LWCF appropriations.
This is an appalling possibility.
Before you lead Congress down this
path, I urge you to consider how much land government already owns, the
environmental condition it is in, and the political and economic consequences of
that ownership.
According to the BLM, the federal government controls about
676 million acres of the nation's land. This constitutes just under thirty
percent of the total. I don't have any idea how much land is owned by state and
local governments, and I don't think anybody else does either, including state
and local officials. The Cascade Policy Institute did a study of how much
property just one county in Oregon owned. The total was staggering and came as a
complete surprise to the county commissioners.
My point is this. All levels
of government already own an enormous amount of land--far too much in my view
and unquestionably far more than they can take care of adequately. Therefore,
before embarking on a land-buying spree, it seems to me that this committee
could do a great service to the nation by initiating an inventory and assessment
of the extent and nature of government land ownership in this country. Then the
question needs to be asked, What is the public purpose for government to own
this particular piece of land? I suspect that in many cases no plausible reason
can be given.
Preservationists will undoubtedly reply that the purpose of
all this government land ownership is to protect the environment. Can anyone who
has first-hand knowledge of the poor condition of many of the federal lands
really take this claim seriously?
Private property ownership is widely
recognized as the source of our economic well being and as the keystone of our
system of limited government and individual liberty. Insofar as H. R. 701
lessens private property ownership, it thereby harms our prosperity and
threatens our liberty. H. R. 701 should be defeated for that reason alone.
But it must also be recognized that private property ownership provides a
higher level of environmental protection than does public or common ownership.
This is simply because private property owners have an incentive--their own self
interest--to take care of what is theirs. That incentive is usually lacking with
public or common ownership. We had recent confirmation of this fact when the
Iron Curtain fell. The preservationists who tout government ownership as an
environmental panacea led us to believe that we would find a Garden of Eden in
the land of socialized property. Instead, we saw one environmental horror after
another: dead lakes, poisoned land, vanishing wildlife.
In this country,
public accountability has prevented some of the worst consequences of
socialization. But we must not be blind to the degradation caused by public
ownership. Even Representative Ralph Regula, a staunch defender of federal land
ownership, has opposed major land acquisition increases simply because the
federal government already owns far more land than it can manage properly.
Representative Regula recently pointed to the fact that the four federal land
agencies have themselves identified a $12 billion backlog in maintenance and
operations.
Adding land to the federal inventory at a $378 million per year
clip can only increase this colossal figure. This in turn can only lead to the
further environmental degradation of our great national parks, forests, and
refuges. In terms of stewardship of resources, H. R. 701 is irresponsible in the
extreme. Nonetheless, proponents claim at every turn that the opposite is true:
H. K 701 "... represents a responsible re-investment of revenue from
non-renewable resources into renewable resources of conservation and
recreation." This claim overlooks that fact that buying the land is just the
beginning. After buying it, government must then take care of it. And that costs
a lot of money and is annual expense in perpetuity.
Where is all the money
to manage these new government lands going to come from? As far as I am aware,
none of the bill's supporters has said a word about that crucial issue. It
appears there are only two choices: either the budget caps for Interior must be
increased by nearly two billion dollars per year; or Interior's budget must be
slashed by nearly two billion dollars per year.
The first choice would be
bad news for American taxpayers. The second choice would be catastrophic for the
environmental condition of the federal lands. With a current backlog in
maintenance and operations of $12 billion, cutting $2 billion out of the
Interior budget simply cannot be done without destroying the federal land
agencies.
The situation with respect to the state and local land acquisition
side of Title II is even more troubling and raises serious federalism concerns.
Removing hundreds of millions of dollars of private land from productive uses
each year will significantly reduce economic activity in many States and local
jurisdictions and consequently reduce the tax base. After all that is
accomplished, these state and local governments will then be burdened with the
cost of maintaining their new public lands. In effect, H. R. 701 encumbers state
and local governments with an unfunded liability that will never end. This
should be a serious objection to anyone who values federalism.
Finally, I
would like to touch on the effects H. R. 701 will have on people whose land is
targeted for acquisition. The fact that several provisions have been included to
try to protect landowners signifies that you, Mr. Chairman, are aware of the
real nature of land acquisition. For its advocates, the purpose of land
acquisition has little to do with preserving the environment. Rather, it has
everything to do with acquiring and using power over people and their resources.
Land acquisition is used, in conjunction with the whole panoply of environmental
regulations, to stop economic activity and to destroy local communities, to deny
recreational access and to block transportation and utility corridors. It is
also used as a weapon to threaten and control private landowners.
Prohibiting condemnation for federal purchases and requiring congressional
approval for acquisitions over one million dollars will help to curb some of the
worst of these abuses, and so I commend you for including them in your bill.
However, the efficacy of either of these provisions should not be overestimated.
Government agencies have perfected techniques using environmental regulations to
turn unwilling sellers into willing sellers. Moreover, this protection is given
only to targets for acquisition by federal agencies. State and local governments
should also be required to purchase land only from willing sellers. Requiring
congressional authorization for acquisitions over one million dollars is fine as
far as it goes for protecting the rights of people who own property worth more
than one million dollars. But I cannot understand why one class of citizens
should be given more protection than another class of citizens. Indeed, it seems
to me that small landowners are more in need of congressional protection from
rapacious and unscrupulous land agencies than are big landowners. We would
therefore suggest that congressional authorization be required for all
acquisitions.
For all these reasons, I urge the committee to abandon and
defeat this unfortunate relic from the era of command-and-control
environmentalism. Mr. Chairman, this concludes my testimony. I would be happy to
answer any questions that you or other members of the committee may have.
END
LOAD-DATE: March 14, 1999
