WILDERNESS: Bingaman preparing public lands package for lame duck

Patrick Reis, E&E reporter
http://www.eenews.net/

11/12/2010 – Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is hoping to pass a package of public lands and wilderness bills during the lame-duck session of Congress.

Bingaman’s panel has sent more than 60 bills to the floor this session that would create new national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and wildlife sanctuaries. Now he’s hoping to bundle them into an omnibus measure for Senate passage before the 111th Congress adjourns, spokesman Bill Wicker confirmed today.

Wicker declined to release the specific bills included in the draft omnibus, but he said it would include most of the bills that have been cleared through committee and few — or none — of the measures that haven’t. The Energy and Natural Resources Committee traditionally approves public lands bills only with unanimous support.

“It’s dozens and dozens of bills,” Wicker said. “Time allowing, [Bingaman] does support it, and it is something he’ll push for.”

Time may not allow for much.

Congress is grappling over a possible extension of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts and has to pass another budget extension if it wants to keep the federal government in business past Dec. 1. And Republicans — fresh off a shellacking of their Democratic rivals in last week’s midterm elections and preparing to run the House come January — aren’t in a hurry to do much more than that.

The package’s quickest road to passage is by unanimous consent, but there are several voices in the Senate that could keep that from happening, Wicker said.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) leads that list, having promised earlier this year to block any bill that did not offset all spending with cuts elsewhere. Coburn threatened to filibuster an omnibus in the final months of 2008, delaying it all the way into the current congressional session.

Wicker said that if the bills could not fit through the agenda, they could quickly be reintroduced and passed through the Senate next session, again as an omnibus.

“These things don’t move independently,” Wicker said. “They don’t move as stand-alones.”

In the Republican-controlled House next session, they may not move at all.

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), who will chair the House Natural Resources Committee in the next Congress, told Greenwire last month that he did not support omnibus measures, and preferred that bills be considered on their merits individually.

If the bills stall this session and fail to resurface in the next, it will be a tremendous disappointment for the wilderness groups that spent much of the past two years shoving them through the congressional grinder.

More than 160 environmental groups wrote a letter to legislators this week begging them to use the waning days of the 111th Congress to pass land and water conservation measures.

The Wilderness Society, which led the coalition of mostly state and local organizations, is focusing on 21 measures that would create new conservation protections on more than 4 million acres — an area slightly larger than the state of Connecticut — including more than 2 million acres of new “wilderness areas.”

Paul Spitler, the group’s national campaigns director, insists that conservation measures are exactly the type of legislation that can beat the lame-duck gridlock.

“Wilderness historically has been a bipartisan issue,” Spitler said.

Spitler said he hoped the bills could pass in the next session, as well, but his colleague at the Wilderness Society, Jeremy Garncarz, said the delays take their toll on the environmental movement at the local level.

“Behind each and every one of these places … are individuals who take time out of their days and lives to advocate for these places,” Garncarz said.

“We run the risk … of losing that,” he said. “Once you reach agreement, the longer it gets drawn out, the greater [the] risk of losing support.”