Anchorage Daily News - July 26, 2000

CONSERVATION BILL CLEARS COMMITTEE

By David Whitney Daily News Reporter

Washington -- After six contentious days, Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski on Tuesday forced his compromise $3 billion annual wildlife and conservation package around unyielding Republicans and to passage by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The measure, called the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, drew the backing of all nine committee Democrats but only four of the 11 Republicans. The panel voted 13-7 to send the measure to the Senate floor and an uncertain future.

Applause broke out in the committee room as Murkowski, the panel's chairman, gaveled the committee to a close after the vote. The measure is popular with sports enthusiasts, wildlife advocacy groups and state governors and mayors because of the money the measure would send their way from federal offshore oil-drilling receipts.

The bill would pump $805 million a year into coastal impact grants to states, $900 million into federal and state parks expansion, $350 million into wildlife conservation and restoration, and hundreds of millions more into urban parks and forestry, historic preservation, rural development and payments to counties in lieu of property taxes on federal lands.

All states get something out of the measure, but the biggest winners are California at about $324 million a year, Texas at $192 million, Louisiana at $176 million, Alaska at $164 million and Florida at $142 million.

"Passage of CARA signifies an unprecedented commitment by the Congress to the conservation and restoration of our precious wildlife, lands and coastal areas," proclaimed R. Max Peterson of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

"This is a breakthrough vote that sets the stage for Congress to enact the most significant conservation funding legislation in the nation's history," said Mark Van Putten, president of the National Wildlife Federation.

But Western Republican conservatives and land rights groups attacked the bill because they say it uses budgetary trickery to move conservation, wildlife and coastal assistance programs to the top of the congressional spending priority list. The bill spends $3 billion a year for 15 years on roughly 20 programs, bringing the total price tag to $45 billion.

"This is a $45 billion pile of pork," decried Mike Hardiman, lobbyist for the American Land Rights Association. "We are going to fight this bill down to the last ditch."

Where the bill goes now is unclear. While the committee vote clears the measure for action by the full Senate, Congress is about to leave for its annual August recess. When it returns in September, congressional leaders hope to rush through must-pass spending bills and then adjourn for the year by early October.

Murkowski said he hopes Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., will schedule the bill for a vote. But Murkowski acknowledged that Republican attacks will follow the bill to the Senate floor, starting with a filibuster that will eat precious time off the Senate clock and that requires 60 votes to stop.

But Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said she thinks there may be enough pressure building on the Senate leadership to take up the bill.

"Where there's a will there's a way," she said. "And we've been building the political will for a long time. The coalition (supporting the bill) is deep and wide and bipartisan. We have the president's support. That combination is unbeatable."

Another talked-about option is for Murkowski and the bill's supporters to skip the Senate floor. Instead, they would go to work with the House, where Alaska Rep. Don Young pushed through a similar bill in May by a wide margin, on a compromise to attach to a must-pass budget bill in late September.

Young, chairman of the House Resources Committee, called the budget-bill approach "more likely."

Like Young, when the House Resources Committee passed the bill in November, Murkowski's critics came from his own party.

Western Republicans complain that the bill requires $450 million be spent each year on new federal land buys that would mean more federal ownership in states where the federal government already was the biggest land owner.

In addition, Murkowski ran into bruising criticism from Senate budgeters and appropriators who recoiled over the bill's automatic spending of $2.5 billion a year in programs. That spending would be triggered by passage of the Interior Department's annual spending bill containing the full $450 million for land purchases.

For five days Republican critics used arcane Senate rules to prevent or restrict committee work sessions. And over the course of the bill's consideration, Murkowski sat patiently as his Republican colleagues took turns castigating the measure as "disingenuous" budget trickery.

"I was not surprised by the attack," Murkowski said Tuesday. "We're just trying to change directions."

Murkowski defended the bill's dedication of offshore oil drilling receipts to conservation-oriented programs, saying that has been Congress' intended use for the money all along.

The problem is that appropriators have a history of spending the cash on other government programs, Murkowski said.