TAXPAYER FIRST ACT OF 2019--Continued

Floor Speech

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Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues in supporting the Great American Outdoors Act, a bill to provide full funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and to address the deferred maintenance backlog for our national parks.

Under the expert leadership of Senators Gardner, Manchin, and Daines, 59 bipartisan Senators have cosponsored this bill that will allow landowners, States, local communities, and conservation partners to plan for the future and to restore our national parks.

More than 50 years ago, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act established America's most successful conservation and outdoor recreation program. There is truly nothing else like it. The fund was designed to ensure that outdoor recreational lands would be secured for future generations.

I remember, in one of my first years in the Senate, working with my colleague from Colorado, Senator and later Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, as we sought to boost the funding for the stateside part of the program.

If you look at a map of the United States and put a pin in every place where there was a Land and Water Conservation Fund stateside supported program, you would find that every single county in the country had at least one project. Oftentimes, people do not realize that local ballpark or the trails that run along a local stream or lake are the result of funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and those are projects that are designed by local people, selected by local people, and then the Federal Government helps in the funding to acquire and maintain the land.

Just last year, this important program was permanently authorized, and now we have the opportunity to ensure for the American people that this program will have consistent funding to play the strongest possible role in preserving open spaces, special lands, and revitalizing communities for years to come.

Investments in this landmark conservation program support access to the outdoors for all Americans, as LWCF, as I have mentioned, has invested in literally every county in our country. Its funding has been used to open up key areas for hunting, fishing, and other recreational access; to support working forests and ranches and protect them from development; to acquire inholdings and protect critical lands in national parks, national wildlife refuges, national forests, Civil War battlefields, and other Federal areas; and, as I mentioned, my favorite part of the program, which is the stateside part of the program, which supports State and local projects, from ballparks to recreational trails.

Over the past five decades, Maine has received more than $191 million in funding from LWCF. Examples of this funding include the Cold Stream Forest, a Forest Legacy Program project in Somerset County to preserve a beautiful area that continues the long and proud Maine tradition of conservation, public access to recreation, and working forests.

In addition, we have the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in southern Maine, where a once-undeveloped 110-acre tract along the coast in Biddeford was preserved for natural habitat and expanded recreational access.

Of the more than 850 Land and Water Conservation Fund sites in Maine, 650 are community-based projects, from Riverside Park in Fort Kent in northern Maine to Haley soccer fields in Kittery, right near the New Hampshire border.

I want to repeat that statistic again. Out of the 850 Land and Water Conservation Fund sites in the State of Maine, 650 are community-based projects, like the park in Fort Kent that I mentioned and the soccer fields in Kittery.

In its more than 50-year history, however, this program has been funded fully only twice at the authorized level of $900 million. I believe that Congress should fully fund this program to deliver on the promise that was made to the American people back in 1964 to take a portion of the proceeds from natural resource development, such as offshore oil drilling, and invest a portion in conservation and outdoor recreation.

I do want to recognize two of my colleagues who have other ideas-- Senator Cassidy and Senator Whitehouse--for bringing up the issue of funding for coastal States. Representing a coastal State, I agree that we need to do more for our coastal States, and I support their efforts to ensure additional funding that can be directed to coastal States and coastal communities. I believe, however, that that issue, regrettably, is going to have to be dealt with at a later time, but I do support their effort.

Furthermore, another important piece of this bill addresses our deferred maintenance backlog on our Nation's public lands. Now, what I am most interested in here is our national parks. Our national parks have a huge maintenance backlog, and that includes at Acadia National Park, a true gem of a park on the coast of Maine where we have seen record numbers of visitors in recent years. This bill will help Acadia National Park tackle the more than $60 million of maintenance backlog work--on trails, roads, bridges, buildings--to ensure that every visitor can experience the absolute beauty of this true gem of a national park on the Maine coastline.

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