Congressional committee to discuss the Great American Outdoors Act, which provided money to preserve the Kelly Parcel. That revenue stream may be in danger.

 

By Angus M. Thuermer Jr., WyoFile.com

A congressional panel will hear testimony in Grand Teton National Park on Friday about the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act amid worries Republicans might cut a line of funding to expand public parkland. 

Congress and the Trump administration have already fired public land agency staff and sought to sell Western public land for development while at the same time boosting logging, drilling, mining and new road-building.

U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman is scheduled to attend the field hearing of the Committee on Natural Resources at Jenny Lake. 

Signed into law by President Trump in August 2020, the GAOA provides two distinct funding channels. One is dedicated to maintenance backlogs and the other is earmarked to create new parkland, including everything from small-town ball diamonds to places like the sensitive Kelly Parcel. The funds benefit public land agencies in the Department of Interior and Department of Agriculture.

The act provides up to $1.9 billion a year for deferred maintenance. The act also permanently provides $900 million annually to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the account that enabled the government to buy the Kelly Parcel wildlife migration crossroad in Grand Teton.

Public land advocates worry the act’s conservation fund is in jeopardy.

“The Land and Water Conservation Fund is a question,” said Rob Wallace, a former high-ranking official with the U.S. Department of the Interior. As an independent citizen, he played a key role in the preservation of the square-mile Kelly Parcel last year.

“The administration says they support the deferred-maintenance piece,” he said. “That’s at least halfway there. I think there’s a very good chance the act will be reauthorized, at least for the deferred maintenance.”

 

Reauthorization and reform

The committee subtitled the hearing “Modernizing and Maintaining National Parks to Celebrate America’s 250th Birthday.”

“The hearing will examine opportunities to reauthorize and reform the Great American Outdoors Act to enhance public access, improve infrastructure, and create new outdoor recreation opportunities at our national parks,” the committee’s notice reads. The notice does not mention the other agencies — U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs — that also benefit from the act. Nor does the notice refer to the conservation fund.

The hearing is scheduled to be live streamed and to include testimony from Leslie Mattson, president of the Grand Teton National Park Foundation. That nonprofit raised $37.6 million to enable the Kelly Parcel conservation purchase, preventing potential development as luxury real estate. (Wyoming, which owned the school section, demanded $100 million, but federal law prohibited the federal government from paying more than the appraised value.)

Chip Jenkins, Grand Teton National Park superintendent, is also on the witness list, along with Julie Calder, Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board chair. Taylor Phillips, Jackson Hole Ecotours founder, and Kristen Brengel, National Parks Conservation Association senior vice president, are also on the agenda.

Many Wyoming politicians have been tepid, if not hostile, toward conservation of federal public land. The American people own about 48% of Wyoming, mainly through the U.S. Forest Service, the BLM and the National Park Service.

Both Wyoming’s Republican Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis voted against the GAOA in 2020.

Hageman signed on as a friend of Utah when that state petitioned the Supreme Court last year to take over, own and control 18.5 million acres of BLM land — property owned by all Americans — in the Beehive State. She likened federal ownership to a casus belli — a case for war.

“[T]he federal government’s actions would amount to an invasion and conquest of that land [in Utah] if … Utah were a separate sovereign nation,” she argued in the unsuccessful pleading before the high court.

Public land advocates will offer their take on the politics of public lands in the West at a forum in Jackson, the day before the field hearings. At 1 p.m. Thursday, a coalition of conservation groups will bring the Keep Parks Public road tour to the Teton County Library.

The public forum will be the sixth stop in five Western states since the road tour began in mid-August. The forum features Peggie DePasquale, a Bridger-Teton National Forest ranger fired during the Trump administration’s recent purge of federal employees. She now works with the Wyoming Wilderness Association.

Jenny Fitzgerald, executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, and Lauren Bogard, a senior director at the Center for Western Priorities, will be among the speakers.

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