Anchorage Daily News - September 28, 2000

CARA COMPROMISE HITS OBSTACLES

By David Whitney - Daily News Washington Bureau

Washington -- Compromise legislation to fund parks and wildlife programs with money from federal offshore oil development appeared to be in trouble Wednesday as House and Senate appropriators insisted on a narrower, less costly program they can control.

At a meeting of House and Senate negotiators working on a 2001 spending bill for the Interior Department, Republican and Democratic leaders would not accept a scaled-down version of the Conservation and Reinvestment Act agreed to Tuesday by the bill's principal authors, Alaska Rep. Don Young and Sen. Frank Murkowski.

Instead the appropriators were standing solidly behind an alternative offered last week by Washington Rep. Norm Dicks, the senior Democrat on the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, that would fund President Clinton's Lands Legacy program of state and federal land acquisitions and parks maintenance programs.

"My instinct is that we are now on two separate tracks," Dicks said after the meeting.

By that Dicks meant that there was a diminishing chance that appropriators could be persuaded to accept the compromise CARA package and that if the bill's supporters wanted its programs and higher levels of funding they would have to find some other way to get it through Congress than by attaching it to a spending bill.

The problem is that the Young-Murkowski bill is virtually dead in the Senate. Although it is believed to have at least 65 votes, more than needed to pass, the Republican leadership has been loath to bring it up because of filibuster threats that could tie the chamber in knots.

Not only do Senate appropriators have reservations about the bill, but conservative Western Republicans deplore its land acquisition features that they fear will lead to land condemnations and more government-owned property.

Young, chairman of the House Resources Committee, and Murkowski, who heads the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, reached a deal Tuesday night with the Democratic leaders of their two committees that was intended to make the popular conservation package less troublesome to appropriators.

Originally they had sought to establish entitlement programs to spend about $3 billion a year for 15 years. The major elements of that package included $900 million a year for state and federal land acquisition, $350 million for state wildlife programs and $1 billion in federal assistance to coastal states.

On Tuesday, Young, Murkowski and their Democratic colleagues, Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Rep. George Miller of California, agreed to scale back that legislation by more than half.

The deal called for a six-year program of guaranteed funding, beginning at $1.8 billion next year and growing to $3 billion by the fifth year. While the money no longer would be strict entitlements beyond the reach of appropriators who write the government's annual spending bills, the appropriations committees still would be constrained to provide the money.

Either way you slice it, said Dicks, the "money goes out automatically." And that's a feature the appropriations committee members won't buy, he said.

John Podesta, chief of staff to President Clinton, who vigorously backed CARA last week, emerged from the appropriations talks without much optimism that a spending bill would be the measure's ticket to enactment.

"We'd like to pass CARA but we are dealing with Interior appropriations," he said.

A coalition of more than 5,000 sports, conservation, recreation, business and civic organizations has grown up behind the Young-Murkowski bill because it would bring new money for ball fields, recreational facilities, coastal habitat repair and non-game wildlife protection. They were not giving up hope Wednesday.

"We think the compromise looks good, and it is something we can be solidly behind," said Naomi Edelson of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. "But it is still up to the House and Senate leaders and the White House to do the right thing with this."

Land rights groups, however, saw no improvement that would cause them to lift their opposition.

"Instead of 15 years of guaranteed pork, it is six years," said Mike Hardiman, lobbyist for the American Land Rights Association. "It is still massive and unprecedented money and power to condemn lands."

Meanwhile, Dicks was working with the White House on ways to sweeten his proposal, and the expectation was that 2001 spending on Clinton's Lands Legacy program would be increased to $1.6 billion or so.

Young and Murkowski had no comment Wednesday.

Reporter David Whitney can be reached at dwhitney@adn.com.

Be informed! Don't allow yourself to be snowed by CARA.