Liberty
Matters News Service
March 11, 2005
Heritage Areas Legislation Under Consideration
The Senate subcommittee on National Parks will hold hearings on four Heritage Area bills next week. There are three new Heritage bills to be considered, as well as legislation that will make an existing Heritage Area a part of the National Park System. The proposed bills will encompass parts of five states and are as follows:
- S. 175: Bleeding Kansas and Enduring Struggle for Freedom National Heritage Area (Kansas)
- S.322: Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership (Vermont and New York)
- S. 429: Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area (Connecticut and Massachusetts)
- S323: a bill to designate the "French Colonial Heritage Area" in Missouri as a unit of the National Park System.
National Heritage Areas Meeting
Bringing the Lawyers to the Landowners
This May, at the Southwest
Landowners Conference, attendees have a unique opportunity to get help for
their issues. Sponsored by two national property rights organizations, the
American Land Foundation and Stewards of the Range, the conference is bringing
in some of the nations top property rights attorneys to meet privately with
attendees on their specific issues. The attorneys, Ladd Bedford, attorney on
Hage v. United States, and Paul Terrill, who is litigating GDF Realty v. Gale
Norton, are a part of the LandGuard program, a network of attorneys working to
help landowners at a reduced fee. The regular conference program features a
powerful line up of property rights experts including Michael Coffman from
Environmental Perspectives, Fred Grant with Stewards of the Range, Plaintiff
Wayne Hage, Former Congressman Helen-Chenoweth Hage, and RJ Smith from Center
for Private Conservation, and Dan Byfield with American Land Foundation. Topics
include conservation easements, takings, ESA, water rights and many other
issues landowners are facing today. The power packed one-day program is a
unique concept. Not only will attendees get up to speed on the issues through
the regular program, but they can also meet privately with some of the best
legal minds in the field of property rights. The conference takes place May
13th in Austin, Texas. For more information go to www.stewards.us or call
1-800-452-6389.
Environmentalists Still Meddling in Forest Management
Eleven diehard environmentalists were
arrested on Monday for attempting to obstruct salvage logging of timber that
burned in the 2002 Biscuit Fire in Oregon's Siskiyou National Forest. About 35
protestors gathered at a bridge leading to the Fiddler timber sale, demanding
the loggers wait until two lawsuits challenging the salvage operation were
heard. The protestors piled rocks and logs across the road and positioned a
pickup in the road draped with a banner that read "Earth First." U. S. Forest
Service officers dispersed the mob and arrested eleven of their band, including
72 year-old Joan Norman who bellowed; "We have no laws in our forest so we will
be the law." The Fiddler Sale is part of the U. S. Forest Service Biscuit
Recovery Project attempting to save some of the thousands of acres that burned
in 2002. Environmentalists claim it is nothing but a thinly disguised plot to
undo Clinton era protections for old growth forests and roadless areas. John
West, president of Silver Creek Timber Company, said, "It's dead, burned
timber. It's going to create jobs." Rolf Skar of the environmental group,
Siskiyou Project, said, "These are areas that are set aside as safety nets of
habitat for sensitive species under the Northwest Forest Plan. Now, nowhere
since the Plan was created has there been massive logging of this type in those
protected reserves." It's hard to believe Skar considers burned forests as
"safety nets of habitat."
Eleven Arrested in Biscuit Fire Logging
Protest
Western Lawmaker Wants to Sell-Off Federal Lands
Rep. Chris Cannon, (R-UT) called upon
President Bush to complete his plan to inventory federal land holdings and then
transfer surplus and under-utilized federal lands to the states. Cannon said
that the 2006 budget contains a proposal to review federal land holdings in the
District of Columbia to determine if they would have more value if owned by the
District. Cannon applauded the president's initiative and said the idea should
be carried further, to inventory and evaluate the millions of acres the federal
government controls in Utah and the other Western States. The federal
government owns more than 670 million acres in the United States and that means
states that host the government have a severely diminished tax base and cannot
fully meet the demands of the federal government to fund law enforcement,
environmental compliance, health care, education and a myriad of other
mandates. The federal government compensates the loss of tax revenue through
the Payment In Lieu of Taxes program (PILT), but Congress has consistently
failed to fully fund the program. This year's PILT funding request of $200
million is $26 million less than last year and is $150 million short of full
funding. The result is taxpayers must pay more in local property taxes to make
up the shortfall.
Freeing Up Federal Lands