Interior chief wants to encourage private conservation

Interior chief wants to encourage private conservation - feds to spend $100 million for public-private partnerships

01/31/2002

The Associated Press
King 5 News

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced plans Thursday for a new $100 million program aimed at encouraging private landowners to take up conservation projects with public land managers and local communities.

Citizens would apply for the money, which would be handed out by states and several Interior Department land-management agencies on a competitive basis. They also would be required to offer a matching contribution, either financial or in-kind, and to show that a proposal would bring results and involves local, state and federal cooperation.

"We think this provides more environmental protection for the money than almost any other approach," Norton told The Associated Press while in Pennsylvania for a tour of John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum on Thursday.

"Hopefully, we would receive many times the investment for the federal money we put in," she said. "It's an important statement about the future of environmentalism, moving toward a problem-solving approach."

Norton hopes the Bush administration request from Congress for $100 million to create the Cooperative Conservation Initiative will round out a portfolio of new programs to promote land-use and protection efforts by private landowners in concert with government.

State conservation programs would hand out $50 million and the directors of three land-management agencies within the Interior Department would select recipients of the other $50 million. The National Park Service would have $22 million, the Fish and Wildlife Service would get $18 million and the Bureau of Land Management would receive $10 million for that purpose.

"It's not necessarily just for private landowners. It could be for some project in a gateway community next to a park, for a local government, for a tribe," said Lynn Scarlett, assistant secretary for policy, management and budget. "It could be for a land user on public lands who is engaging in some really innovative conservation effort."

Steve Moyer, vice president for conservation programs at Trout Unlimited, said Thursday that Norton's new program seems to be designed to "push forward the good cooperative conservation work that's being done around the country."

But he said his group also wanted to see the Interior Department's overall budget picture that's being released next week because "this administration has a way of funding things by taking money from other good places."

As part of President Bush's fiscal 2003 budget, the Interior Department is seeking "a net increase" in overall funding for conservation projects after shifting or refocusing some other programs, Scarlett said.

Those conservation projects include $60 million - a $10 million increase over the previous year - for two other new programs Norton promoted last year for private landowner conservation efforts, Scarlett said.

Before the government starts giving out more money to private conservationists, said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, federal environmental officials should first focus on fundamental needs like getting more money for protecting endangered species.

"This sounds like another example of a good but lower-priority program which is being funded at the expense of the basic legal obligations of the Department of the Interior," Pope said.