Anchorage Daily News - October 4, 2000 
YOUNG LOSES FIGHT FOR CARA 
By David Whitney - Daily News Washington Bureau

Washington -- The House overwhelmingly approved a huge increase in conservation spending Tuesday after rejecting a last-minute appeal to block the measure because it did not provide cities and states the certainty of funding contained in the foundering Conservation and Reinvestment Act.

The measure approved Tuesday, an $18.8 billion spending bill for the Interior Department and U.S. Forest Service, includes a new $12 billion, six-year program to direct proceeds from federal offshore drilling into parks, wildlife and coastal initiatives.

It will double the $742 million going into conservation programs this year, and will top out at $2.4 billion annually in 2005 and 2006. Roughly a quarter of that money will go for coastal and fisheries programs, including as much as $100 million for California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska to work on habitat improvements for endangered salmon.

Washington Rep. Norm Dicks, the senior Democrat on the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee who helped negotiate the provision, called it the "most dramatic increase in conservation funding" ever approved by Congress.

But Tuesday's 348-69 vote probably ends two years of work by Alaska Rep. Don Young, who battled to save his sweeping CARA entitlement package that would have been the crowning achievement of his six-year term as chairman of the House Resources Committee.

Because of term limits for committee chairmen, Young must step down as resource chairman at the end of this session, just a week or two away. But Young said he is not leaving Congress, and that he'll be back to fight another day for his bill.

"This issue is not going away," Young vowed on the House floor in an angry tirade against congressional appropriators he accused of undercutting his 15-year, $45 billion CARA bill.

"I'll be here long after you are gone," Young said. "I will win this battle for the American people. You can say how great you've done in this bill. What you've actually put in this bill is hollow, and when they find out I'll be back."

But Dicks said it was Young's efforts on CARA that led to the success on the appropriations bill.

"He did a great job of getting CARA through the House, but CARA just didn't make it through the Senate," Dicks said. "Maybe it still will. We'll have to wait and see."

Young's bill was approved by a 3-to-1 vote in May. But the version approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee headed by his Republican colleague, Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski, has run into trouble in the Senate and is not expected to come up on the Senate floor before Congress adjourns.

The only option to move legislation this year was to attach it to a spending bill. But the approach taken by Young and Murkowski was to set aside the conservation funding as state entitlement programs that House and Senate appropriators are powerless to control through annual spending bills.

When Appropriations Committee negotiators sat down to work on the Interior Department spending bill last week, Dicks offered an alternative that increased conservation funding but left the spending committees doling out the cash.

Dicks emphasized that appropriators, while in control of spending decisions, are not free to fritter away the money on nonconservation programs. If the money is not fully spent one year, he said, it will be reserved for the next.

"This is landmark legislation," Dicks said. "We should be celebrating."

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., who worked with Dicks to broker the deal, said the Appropriations Committee approach was necessary because the Young-Murkowski bill was dead.

"This is not CARA," Obey said. "But CARA was dead as a dodo bird in the Senate."

But Young charged that the legislation would leave the federal government in charge of state spending programs.

His efforts to derail the spending bill ended in a 354-65 vote, with only 12 Republicans voting with him to send the spending bill back to a House-Senate conference committee.

The conference report -- the agreement reached on the Interior spending bill -- will go to the Senate today.

The CARA package would have sent $1 billion a year to states for coastal habitat protection and impact assistance, $350 million a year in wildlife programs and dedicated $900 million a year for state and federal land purchases for parks and recreation and other programs.

It would have meant about $324 million a year for California, $164 million a year for Alaska, and at least 192 million a year for Texas and $176 million a year for Louisiana.

Under the appropriations compromise, however, how much any state gets will depend on how much the appropriations panels decide to give them each year. There are no set formulas, and no implicit promises.

Despite the fast-dimming prospects for the Young-Murkowski bill, CARA advocates were not throwing in the towel.

They released a Tuesday letter from Senate leaders saying they still hoped to bring up the CARA legislation this year.

"This letter is very timely and sends the clear signal that CARA remains alive," said Naomi Edelson of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.

But Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., told reporters late Tuesday that time has run out.

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

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