Open the Door Wider

You would think that nothing is more apple-pie than investing in parks, habitat and open space right now for our children's children. Our mountains, woods and wetlands are important to us for all sorts of biological, aesthetic, ethical and social reasons; people need places to fish, hike, bird, picnic and enjoy the outdoors. This is an investment, a legacy for the future.

In New Jersey, we have many open space needs. We already have some 30,000+ acres targeted as future additions to our five National Wildlife Refuges: Great Swamp, Wallkill, Barnegat, Forsythe and Cape May. We have major open space needs in the Highlands region alone, perhaps 300,000 acres, and perhaps another 300,000 elsewhere in the state, exclusive of farmland (see New Jersey Audubon, Summer 1995 for a fuller treatment of open space needs). Clearly the conservation of that much land requires multiple approaches ranging from acquisition to conservation zoning to private stewardship. But to guarantee permanently protected open space with public access, much of that land will have to be bought. That is why in 1964 the Congress of the United States, recognizing the need that communities had for acquiring parks and open space, established the Land and Water Conservation Fund (P.L. 88-578) for precisely that purpose.

The idea behind the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) was simple. The oil companies would return to the government a certain portion of the revenue they obtained from using public resources in offshore oil drilling. This extraction would be balanced by using these revenues to protect the environment The revenues were to be used to create the Land and Water Conservation Fund, to purchase parks and refuges all across the country.

For many years the fund worked as it was intended to work. But beginning in the 1980's, something went wrong. Although Congress had authorized the spending of up to $900 million for land, the stream began to trickle. Revenues were still collected, but not spent according to the authorization level. In 1995, for example, almost $1 billion was collected for the LWCF, but only $235 million was spent for the lands. That is reduced again in the 1996 budget. In the past 17 years, a total of $11 billion was collected for the LWCF from offshore oil receipts, but not spent for conservation. Meanwhile, the needs of the various communities are going begging. In New Jersey, those 30,000 target acres for National Wildlife Refuge additions are at stake.

We think this trickle of funds is wrong. The pipe should be unplugged, the door opened, and serious funding restored. We pay for the land at the gas pump. Congress should not be allowed to divert funds dedicated to parks and forests for other purposes. In New Jersey, the clock is ticking on many critical lands. New Jersey citizens know that, because they vote for the Green Acres bond issues by 3 to 1 every time they go on the ballot. But it will take more than the state Green Acres bond issue to generate the funds for all those needed acres. We need a stable source of funding from a broad-based source for the state component of the funding, but we also need the federal funds from the LWCF for our nationally significant resources like the wildlife refuges. The LWCF was not established to fund deficits, but to make sound investments in the future of those national resources.

Richard Kane

Director of Conservation