Chugach Alaska Land Exchange Oil Spill Recovery Act of 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEGICH. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 3903, the Chugach Alaska Land Exchange Oil Spill Recovery Act, a bill I introduced to right a historic wrong that has gone unresolved for more than three decades.

Nearly 40 years ago, an oil tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, spilling over 11 million gallons of crude oil across 1,300 miles of pristine Alaskan coastline. In the aftermath, the Federal Government used settlement funds to acquire roughly 231,000 acres of surface land for conservation, but it never acquired the subsurface rights underneath. Those belong to Chugach Alaska Corporation under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

The result was a split estate. The Federal Government owned the surface. Chugach owned the subsurface, and neither side could act. Conservation goals were incomplete, and Chugach's Alaska Native shareholders were locked out of their lands.

This bill fixes that. Under H.R. 3903, Chugach trades its approximately 231,000 acres of unusable subsurface estate, land beneath Federal conservation holdings that cannot be practically developed, in exchange for approximately 65,000 acres of fee simple land identified by the Bureau of Land Management as economically viable and culturally significant.

Through this action, the Federal footprint in Alaska is actually reduced by approximately 65,000 acres. Not 1 acre is added to the Federal estate. This is a true win-win. It perfects the conservation purpose of the original oil spill recovery program by unifying the surface and subsurface estates, and it finally gives Chugach Alaska Corporation and its Native shareholders the opportunity for the foundation that ANCSA intended.

Congress recognized this problem in 2019, when it directed the Department of the Interior to study this issue. BLM delivered its report in 2022, confirming the conflict and identifying lands for exchange.

This legislation is built on those findings, the product of years of work by Chugach Alaska Corporation, by the Alaska delegation, through bipartisan work in the House Natural Resources Committee, and this body.

Mr. Speaker, the people of the Chugach region have waited 36 years for this resolution, and this bill delivers it.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 3903. I thank the House Natural Resources Committee for its unanimous bipartisan support.

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