Taxpayer First Act of 2019

Floor Speech

Let's get a couple of things very clear.

First of all, this is not about the Land and Water Conservation Fund. We reauthorized permanently the Land and Water Conservation Fund in the last Congress, and in doing that, in a House Republican bill, I might add, we took the State-side projects--these are the kinds of things like easements and picnic grounds and roads and parks that your constituents are all telling you that they like, those are called the State-side projects--and we actually increased the funding for those programs.

We also put in that act a limitation on the amount of money that could be used to buy more land. This bill is about that concept, the limitation of land acquisition. The special interest groups have been putting pressure on you and are giving you misinformation about this particular thing. They simply want to circumvent the limits that were pushed in that bill that was there earlier.

This is two bills merged together. The first one was the old H.R. 1225, the backlog maintenance bill that Mr. Grijalva referred to in his speech. We wanted to see if we could actually help parks and other public lands who are having a maintenance backlog that is near $20 billion today.

Many people, 330 people, cosponsored that bill. Obviously, it was popular. But for 1\1/2\ years, Democratic leadership failed and refused to move that bill. One of their arguments was, this is key, there is no offset for a bill that scored $7 billion. They refused to move it because there was no offset.

That bill would fund parks' maintenance backlogs by taking excess revenue from those that come from all the energy development, but primarily oil and gas, off-coast as well as on land, and after we pay our obligations, the first $1 billion of the excess would be used to maintain our parks. That is still a decent bill.

You have added that, or the Democrats in the Senate have added that, to a second bill that is mandatory $900 million of spending. That mandatory spending will be from now until eternity, but the goal of that is simply to increase the buying power to buy more lands, not to create the State-side projects which we increased.

We are spending trillions of dollars on coronavirus emergency spending. We still have to pay for that. If you really think that mandatory increasing of our debt is the right policy, I think there is a problem there because the CBO did say that this new concoction--bill scores at $17 billion. And I want you to notice there is no offset for that in this bill.

Both House Republicans and House Democrats have rules that they will not bring a bill to the floor that is not offset. The Blue Dog Democrats unanimously wrote a letter to their leadership saying, Do not bring a bill to the floor that is not offset.

This violates the rules of both the Democrats and the Republicans clearly and adds $17 billion to the debt, and the reason this is here is, well, because.

Both LWCF, as well as what we want to do with park maintenance, is paid for by royalties from those gas and oil explorations. The excess was to go to parks. We already have obligations with those royalties. GOMESA is an obligation. Historic preservation is an obligation. State reimbursement is an obligation. Those are priorities.

Now, we are also saying in this bill, the $1 billion of money to buy more land is now also a priority above and beyond what is happening for the parks and what will get there for the parks, which may not in normal times be a concern, but in this era, CRS has already certified that we are 84 percent lower in the amount of activity and the amount of royalties coming in from our energy development than we were a year ago. That is 2 million barrels of oil a day less than we were producing and getting royalties from them last year.

So if buying more land is the priority, the maintenance of our backlog could be totally left out.

Now, this is not for wont of what we are trying to do. There were amendments to try and fix this, but they were not allowed to be brought to this floor. There are amendments in the Senate to fix these problems, but they were not allowed to be brought to the floor. There will be many on both sides of the aisle, some on our side, who will support and defend this bill.

I will remind you we are having a heat wave here in Washington, D.C. For the first time in four years we are coming close to 100 degrees, but the heat index is well into three digits. There are a lot of people suffering from heat stroke.

This bill is actually extremely poorly drafted. It assumes basic things. But if, for instance, as we said, the royalties don't show up as we are anticipating, we don't have that $1 billion to buy more land. How do you solve that? Do you prorate that money? Do you take it from other sources? Do you put this mandatory spending above other mandatory spending, like Social Security?

CRS said those are good questions, and they don't know because this bill is silent on all those questions.

It says the President is supposed to come up with $900 million of projects. What if he only comes up with $800 million? Who gets that extra $100 million? Does that go to the Department of the Interior? Is that a slush fund?

Once again, CRS said, Good questions, and no one knows because this bill is silent on those types of questions.

BLM has no idea of how much money they have spent on this program or where the land is. The State portion is actually--they are okay because they are a percentage. But this is talking about a dollar figure.

So you are going to hear a lot of platitudes, but somebody, at some time, has got to say how this money is going to actually be funded.

To help us with that, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry), a longtime member of this legislature, who can address those things.

Mr. KEVIN HERN of Oklahoma. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ranking Member Bishop for his work on this issue.

Mr. Speaker, in the wake of a global pandemic unlike anything we have seen in our lifetime, we have spent unprecedented amounts of money this year. We have already saddled the next generation with unthinkable debt. Digging our way out of this hole is going to take time and targeted effort. We cannot continue to spend as if our debts don't exist.

This legislation needlessly increases the deficit. The Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is already incredibly well-funded, does not need an additional $900 million a year in perpetuity. With immediate health needs and economic recovery our top priorities, increasing the Federal real estate holding shouldn't be on anyone's to-do list.

A recent report showed that 40 percent of LWCF funds went to projects that failed to advance any agency objectives. The oversight and accountability of the fund is laughable, but this bill seeks to exacerbate the lack of transparency by removing elected officials from the situation altogether and handing unilateral power to political appointees and unelected bureaucrats.

There are more productive ways that we should spend our time this week, and I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill.

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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, the Dingell Act, 2 years ago, was bipartisan. If this were bipartisan, we would not be here.

But to illustrate that, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar).

Mr. Speaker, I won't tell the gentleman from Utah that the Utah Association of Counties is opposed to this and all the trails that he is talking about come from the State's side of projects. That is beside the point.

We have talked about several of the problems with this particular bill. With this particular bill, we have talked about how the poor reckoning of its sources there do not say what is going to happen if this money does not develop. I think Mr. Graves would be good to talk about where this money is coming and how it is being used at the same time. And we don't necessarily know what will happen with the lowering of the royalties that we are experiencing this year from next year.

There is one other consideration I hope that people will understand, especially for all those who are speaking about it who come from the eastern coast. There was a conforming amendment put in the Senate in this particular bill, a conforming amendment. In the good old days, we used to call them earmarks, but it is a conforming amendment.

The original bill said that on Forest Service land that would be bought, 15 percent of that had to come from west of the 100th meridian and 85 percent had to come from east of the 100th meridian. That was taken out, quietly and surely taken out. The end result of that means that there is a siphoning of billions of dollars that should be and could be going to Eastern States.

I mention that because one of the Democrat speakers did speak about the need for urban recreation opportunities. That was what was supposed to happen, and with this conforming amendment, that is what is taken out of the bill.

In the 1960s, as this bill was being discussed, Orville Freeman was the Secretary of Agriculture for Kennedy. He said at that time that the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission pointed out that the greatest need for recreation opportunities lies in the areas adjacent to the metropolitan centers in the Eastern States.

It would be our purpose under this bill to expand about 84 percent of what would be available under it for acquisition in the eastern national forest acquired under the Weeks Act.

In fact, that commission went on to say that outdoor opportunities are most urgently needed near metropolitan areas. Much of the West and virtually all of Alaska are of little use to most Americans looking for a place in the Sun for their families on a weekend when the demand is overwhelming.

At regional and State levels, most of the land is where people are not. One-sixth is in the sparsely populated Alaska. Seventy-two percent of the remainder is in the West, where only 15 percent of the people live. The Northeast, where one-quarter of the people live, only 4 percent of the acreage is there.

But that language was not put in there by happenstance. There was a reason for it. In one iteration of this particular act that we introduced a long time ago, there was the idea of putting a specific percentage that would go to urban recreation so there would be those urban recreation concepts, as was originally designed in the bill. That has been taken out.

What that will mean is that for you who live east of the 100th meridian, basically east of Denver, there will be $1.19 billion less dedicated to you than there would have been if this amendment had not been put in there. That works out to an average of $32 million per congressional district of those living east of Denver.

I am glad that all those who are for this, on whatever side, will have a good time to explain to their constituents why they are in favor of giving their area $32 million less in recreation opportunity simply because you are going to confirm a conforming amendment that was slipped into the Senate version of this bill that really hurts this process and is not necessarily positive.
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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time I actually have left here.

We have heard all sorts of platitudes about this bill today. Whether it passes or not is actually irrelevant. It is not bipartisan, and it has all sorts of flaws. There are questions about the future source of funding.

We have heard speaker after speaker come up and say: We are not talking about taxpayers' money. This is only royalties that are off there.

One of the problems we have to face is that all the royalties that come from offshore development and onshore development from energy and gas, those royalties are placed in the general fund. In fact, the second largest source of funds that go into the general fund is from these royalties, second only to the IRS taxes that go in there. If these revenues weren't deposited in LWCF, they would be deposited in the general fund of the U.S. Treasury. If that is not taxpayer money, I don't know what is.

We have talked about the need for, actually, urban recreation areas. We would like to do it, but unfortunately, this bill diminishes that opportunity and puts it in limbo, which is not good.

I have heard speaker after speaker come up here with pretty pictures about our national parks, reservation lands, BLM land, resource lands, all these things that need to be helped. A lot of them talked about all the wonderful programs that are on State lands, that are parks, roads, picnic areas, and all those things which we are already doing.

When we permanently reauthorized the LWCF last Congress, that is when we put more money into those types of things everyone says is wonderful.

What we didn't put more money into is buying Federal land, buying more land to put into the Federal estate. As everyone talks about how important it is actually to now start putting money into park maintenance, into maintenance of the backlog, what this bill does is put that at the very lowest rung on priorities of where this royalty money is spent.

You will spend it first on GOMESA. You will send it to the States. It will go to historic preservation. You will spend it on buying up more land before you ever come to anything that helps the parks and helps the public lands. That is because we have disproportionately done this.

This bill is not about funding our public lands. This bill is about circumventing the limitations that we put in in the last Congress on buying more land. The only thing this bill is about is how we can find another way to buy more property.

We can't even afford the property we already have. There is a $20 billion maintenance backlog. But what this is attempting to do is find a way to put more money into buying more land so we can exacerbate that problem.

Now, you can say all you want to about how wonderful it is, how good it is, and, I am sorry, most of those platitudes were misstated. They were talking about things that either already exist or are actually being de-emphasized by this particular bill.

What this bill is about is: Are you going to put more money into buying more land before you put more money into actually maintaining the land we already have? That is really the only issue of this bill, and that is why we are fighting this strongly about it.

Last year, when we did the Dingell Act, that was bipartisan. We had worked together to come up with a lot of bipartisan stuff. This was not a bipartisan bill. Mr. Kilmer, I appreciated his work with me on the parks. That was bipartisan. This is not bipartisan. It is still about how do we buy more land. That is the goal of this piece of legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``no'' vote, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

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