Public Lands Omnibus – This Is No Way To Legislate

Op-Ed

Public Lands Omnibus – This Is No Way To Legislate

Wyoming is blessed with some of our nation's most spectacular mountain ranges, pristine rivers, wide open spaces, and unparalleled natural resources. The privilege of living in our beautiful state comes with an added and counterbalancing responsibility – to care for and protect our unique natural treasures while providing our nation with the energy it needs.

Working together, the people of Wyoming have always met this challenge head on. We don't shy away from hard tasks.

Good stewardship of the land is a Wyoming value. As a rancher, I hold that ideal in the highest regard. I believe we need a balanced approach toward energy development and land conservation. That balance has served us well for generations.

The “Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009,” currently before the U.S. House of Representatives, fails to achieve that balance. This omnibus measure is an unamendable catalog of 164 bills – nearly 100 of which have never been considered by the full House. Contained within this behemoth are two bills of particular impact to Wyoming: the Wyoming Range Legacy Act and the Snake River Wild and Scenic bill.

As I have consistently stated, I support these two Wyoming specific bills with a couple of targeted improvements. For starters, I believe the boundary lines in the Wyoming Range Legacy Act should be based on topography rather than arbitrary lines that fail to acknowledge resource realities.

I also want to consider restricting drilling for a period of years as opposed to locking up those lands and resources forever. As currently written, the bill does not allow for the possibility that future advances in production technologies can extract the energy resource with little to no impact on the land.

I also support the position held by the Lincoln County commissioners to remove the parts of the Snake River located in Lincoln County covered by the Snake River Wild and Scenic bill. As of right now, the House Democrat leadership team has made clear there will not be an opportunity to make these revisions or even consider the bills separately on their own merits. I hope they will reconsider their decision.

With the federal deficit reaching record highs and the economy struggling to get back on its feet, the people of Wyoming should not be forced to carry an even greater burden. This bloated bill increases Washington spending by more than $10 billion. That might seem like a small amount of money to some here in Washington, but folks in Wyoming understand that is a big chunk of change.

The Casper Star Tribune recently stated the cost of the bill being $4 billion over the next five years. But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the cost of the omnibus bill to more than $8 billion. The Star Tribune's estimate also doesn't include the additional $2 billion in spending the Senate tacked on the bill before they passed it.

Further, the omnibus package contains more than 150 projects outside of Wyoming that will put the nation further into debt and will only slow our economic recovery. One single provision calls for a $1 billion water project in California to settle a lawsuit with environmental groups for the restoration of 500 salmon. I believe that is a gross misuse of Wyoming taxpayer dollars.

Another piece of the omnibus package puts into law the National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS) which was created administratively nine years ago by the Clinton Administration. The NLCS system uses vague management “values” such as ‘viewscapes,' ‘soundscapes,' and even ‘smellscapes.' Your guess is as good as mine as to what affect protecting “soundscapes” could have on hunting access, or how “smellscapes” might affect BLM grazing permits.

The NLCS designation includes roughly 575,000 acres of Wilderness Study Areas (WSA's) within Wyoming. WSA's are units of land managed by the BLM while their wilderness potential is supposedly being reviewed by the agency. Unfortunately, once these lands are listed as WSA's, there is no requirement as to when they must either be designated as full wilderness areas, or released if it is found they are unfit for listing.

Currently, far too much land is held in temporary status, not yet designated as protected, but not available for multiple-use, public access either. This single provision will only make it all the more difficult to enjoy a wide range of activities on the hundreds of thousands of acres of public land not suitable for full wilderness designation.

This is not an easy vote for me to cast, especially in light of the legacy of my dear friend Senator Craig Thomas, which is honored in the Wyoming Range bill. In the end, after weighing the pros and cons of this massive lands package, I cannot support it because of its enormous cost to Wyoming taxpayers and restriction to millions of acres of federal lands.

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