Energy

Dems Split Over Trump’s Plan To End Mismanagement Of National Parks

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Tim Pearce Energy Reporter
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A Trump administration plan to pay off a backlog of deferred maintenance on public lands is getting support from Democrats desperate to solve the decades-old issue, The Washington Examiner reported.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has put forward a plan to use royalties collected from energy development on federal lands to pay off the $16 billion backlog. Zinke’s plan would establish the Public Lands Infrastructure Fund that would collect roughly $18 billion in fees payed to the federal government over the next decade.

Bipartisan coalitions in both chambers of Congress are pushing bills based off the administration’s plan.

“I don’t understand other Democrats who are opposed to this,” Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader of Oregon, one bill’s cosponsor, told The Washington Examiner. “The money comes from oil and gas revenue, but what’s greener than our national parks system? Let’s be smart about this for gosh sake and use this money for something that promotes the values I’d like to think thoughtful Democrats and Republicans both have with our national parks.”

The National Parks Service (NPS) holds the largest share of the debt at $11.6 million. The NPS and other agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) are struggling to keep public lands open and accessible without the funds to repair failing infrastructure.

“Some of these areas get to a point where we just have to shut them off for public use, because of public safety,” FWS Principal Deputy Director Greg Sheehan told E&E News in February.

The backlog has been a growing issue for decades and has become more pronounced as attendance at national parks keeps increasing. The growing backlog has placed pressure on federal officials and politicians to find a solution to the issue.

“The problem of today is simply that the parks are being loved to death,” then National Park Service Director Conrad Wirth diagnosed the problem 62 years ago. “They are neither equipped nor staffed to protect their irreplaceable resources, nor to take care of their increasing millions of visitors.”

Some Democrats say the administration’s solution includes too many compromises to win their support, however.

“We are going to be incentivizing extraction of oil and gas,” Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee, told The Washington Examiner. “I understand the desperation some Democrats feel as it pertains to the maintenance backlog, and I absolutely agree with them. I am willing to talk. But the premise of the plan is the more extraction, the more we take care of the backlog. And that’s backwards.”

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