New Natural Resources Committee Chair, Rep. Rob Bishop UT.. on plans to change LWCF..

Article from the Washington Examiner.. March 23, 2015..

Rep. Rob Bishop has a radical plan for changing public land policy, and it starts with an experiment in his home state of Utah.

The Republican is known for shaking things up with his dry sense of humor and occasional belligerence toward Obama administration officials. Easily identified by his three-piece suits and coiffed white hair, the new House Natural Resources Committee chairman is trying to turn his panel from a legislative backwater into a driver of reform.

“If you’re going to keep a program, let’s make it do something and think outside the box,” Bishop told the Washington Examiner during an interview in his committee’s office. “To actually use these programs and make them do something for people, make them actually benefit people, not just pat yourself on the back and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got a program, we did something.’ ”

For example, Bishop wants to hand the states more control over the 50-year-old Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program funded by oil and gas drilling royalties that must be reauthorized by the end of the year. The initiative has received its full $900 million

Washington Examiner: With the Land and Water Conservation Fund, I hear a lot about how the states need more control. But how can you go about affecting that? Is it changing the formula?

Bishop: I’d tell you the details, but then we’d have to kill you afterwards. If you’re actually going to spend an extra $600 million, there’s no way in hell I am going to allow you just to spend that to buy the inholdings [private land surrounded by federal land] they’re talking about or to expand the footprint of the federal government.

I like saying, OK, outdoor recreations, but for state governments and tribes to do those. They have the best interest, people can actually get to their state and local governments and put pressure on them or lobby them. What are you going to do to the Interior Department if they decide to change their minds? Stand out in front of the mausoleum and try to throw rocks at the building? It just doesn’t happen.

There are other problems that we have out there that don’t have a solution right now. Indian health is one in which we’ve been dealing with for a long time, there is a need for some kind of funding mechanism.

The other thing we have never done is try and plow money back into the industry that develops the funds in the first place. They have an aging population that’s working there, and these are great paying jobs. We don’t have Americans who are taking those jobs, they’re all foreigners, because we have never come up with a policy to try and help people be trained for this kind of environmental engineering work.

Examiner: To me, it doesn’t sound like that’s necessarily changing the program. It sounds like that’s using the money that’s supposed to go to the program for other purposes.

Bishop: Yes. Well, yes and no. It’s not really changing the program, it’s expanding it to meet needs that can actually help people. But if you’re not going to expand to meet needs, then why the hell do you keep doing it in the first place?

Examiner: One of the things you’ve advocated is turning over more control of federal parks and land to the states. After the shutdown you definitely advocated for that. Where does that rank in your list of priorities? You’ve got a pretty full schedule it looks like here.

Bishop: No one is talking about changing the national parks over to states. But that’s still only 13 percent of the estate. What I have encouraged is that there are a whole lot of areas that could become great parks that should not be part of the federal system because that’s where we have a glut of land and parks and a backlog that cannot be manned. But they can be made into state parks.

Examiner: So how would that arrangement work?

Bishop: What I’d like to do is land transfers, which is to actually give this land that is not being managed well by the federal government to states who would manage it well.

The simple example is that Goblin Valley area [in Utah]. People were going on the trail system on the [Bureau of Land Management] property and you came to a fork and you could either go back to the trailhead or go back to Death Canyon, which is actually what it was called there. And it took a couple people dying because they took the wrong fork in the road before we actually got them to fork up I think it was 5,000 bucks to put up a sign saying which one goes back to the trailhead and which one takes you to your death.

Examiner: But the states, they have to balance their budgets. What’s the certainty — let’s take the premise that [the Bureau of Land Management] isn’t managing these lands well. But what’s to say that in hard times in another financial recession or whatever that the states would?

Bishop: The states have a better track record in managing that. The federal government keeps the parks, but they have always been in a deficit. They never manage anything well.

I am pushing a massive land transfer in eastern Utah. That is going to be one of the elements in it, so that conversation will come up. We’re going to create massive amounts of wilderness and conservation areas and economic development and outdoor recreation and state parks and wild, scenic rivers. You’ll be amazed with what I’m going to do there. But it will require the federal agency to say, ‘OK, we can give up some of the land.’ Another problem we have is if the attitude of the Forest Service and the Interior Department is there is no net loss of acreage — and that is their policy — then nothing is ever going to happen.

That is the same mindset that the German East government had in the Communist era. So it’s either East Germany was right or we’re wrong, and I don’t think East Germany was right.

Examiner: So what would be the policy that you seek?

Bishop: The policy I would like to see ultimately going forward — and this is going to be a long time in coming — is that land transfers are based on the value that is to mankind. Where is that land most beneficially used and not an arbitrary acre-for-acre or dollar-for-dollar figure. And part of the reason that we actually have this dollar-for-dollar land transfer crap — you can’t appraise that is not developed for what it potentially could be, and yet we try and do that. That is a flawed, flawed process.

Examiner: In this eastern Utah development — would this all be recreation, or would there also be oil and gas production?

Bishop: This is a massive change. So we will develop conservation areas and wilderness areas. We will identify some that are being used that way, we’ll make them officially as wilderness with a defined boundary.

We will develop with that outdoor recreation opportunities that are not allowed but mandated to take place. We will then also develop energy zones where energy development can take place and will allow it to take place. We’re going to have some scenic rivers and we’re going to take some scenic rivers away. … I’m going to give land up for recreation opportunities directly to the state of Utah, we’re going to put some language in there that guarantees grazers have the right to continue on with what what they’re doing. We’re going to prohibit Antiquities Act monuments designations in these areas so the counties can actually have finality so they can know with certainty what they can develop and what they can’t develop in the future.

The whole effort is to try to end the constant litigation and battles over these lands and say, ‘OK, we made a final decision.’ And that’s why this is huge, this is big, we have never actually tried something in Utah that big. I don’t think anyone has tried something that big before.

Examiner: If a congressman has land that they want to get a federal designation for, what are you going to look for as chairman? What should it include?

Bishop: Is it legitimate wilderness characteristics, but more importantly, what kind of other opportunities are given there? Are you guaranteeing outdoor recreation opportunities? Do you guarantee economic development that can be gained as well? Just creating wilderness for the sake of creating wilderness, we’ve been doing that.

Examiner: When you say economic development, what do you mean by that?

Bishop: It can actually be almost anything. It can be outdoor recreation — if you guarantee it, it could spur economic development. If in my area, for example, there’s a lot of areas in which I want to trade some areas that are great for oil and gas for some areas that could be economic, make those trades. It depends on where you are. A lot of them it simply depends on guaranteeing grazing rights in the future.

Examiner: The administration has frowned upon those types of arrangements. It’s not like Congress didn’t pass federal land designations last year — it did. It’s just that the administration said, ‘We don’t like that you did it in this certain way.’ How do you convince the federal government to coming around to your way of thinking?

Bishop: Minus using a baseball bat? Yeah. What the federal government is doing is simply saying, ‘We want to do it the way we used to do it in the good old days.’ That doesn’t work. It produces nothing but litigation and stalemate. If they actually want to develop conservation of areas and want to develop outdoor recreation, we will do that. We can easily do that. But you can’t say, ‘We want you to do it, but we want you to do it our way.’ Because their way simply has not worked and it’s not going to work in the future.

Examiner: Their way seems to be the Antiquities Act.

Bishop: OK, fine. I’ll stay off that soapbox for a minute and make it easy for you. The problem with the Antiquities Act is they don’t take into consideration any of the details that are necessary. We have Antiquities Act proposals that have problems that are still outstanding years and years afterwards, and it does not allow for public input.

Examiner: The administration has maintained that it only uses the Antiquities Act when there has been local support and meetings at the local level. Is there a more formal way you’re recommending that happen?

Bishop: Use the [National Environmental Policy Act] process, which would mandate public hearings and how those hearings would be done. Or what we should probably better do is just establish the criteria that they would have to deal with. I’m sorry, no, they have not had formal hearings. In fact, most of them nobody knew about before it was announced. That’s the problem. With the Antiquities Act, it was meant to protect something that was endangered of being destroyed. Four out of the last five presidents have used it specifically as a political weapon to make a political point. It’s no longer used to protect anything.

Examiner: How would you describe your relationship with Secretary Jewell?Bishop: I think it’s personally friendly. But at the end of the day, I think it’s what I said at the very beginning: I like her, I think she has a unique approach to the way things are, I think she is someone with whom we could work. But her agency still makes dumb decisions. At least she talks to us before it makes the dumb decisions, but they are still dumb decisions.

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