On Feb. 12, the United States Senate passed a public lands bill that will permanently reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The reauthorization of the fund is a great step, but until Congress makes its spending mandatory, public lands will not be protected as effectively as they should.

“We wish it could’ve gotten across the finish line, too,” Jonathon Asher, a government relations manager at The Wilderness Society, said of mandatory spending. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t get there this year.”

Historically, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has been popular because the fund comes at no cost to the American taxpayer. As oil and gas companies extract resources from federally-owned waters, they pay royalties to the government. A portion of these royalties is then invested through the fund for the conservation of open spaces onshore.

Though the Land and Water Conservation Fund is an effective program, it has been chronically delayed by Congress.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund has accumulated $40 billion since 1965. But Congress has spent less than half of it, and the unused funds cannot be used for any other purpose. There are billions of dollars sitting around. That’s money that could be used to maintain parks across the city of Syracuse and Onondaga County.

After 50 years of bipartisan authorization, the Land and Water Conservation Fund expired in September 2018, robbing communities like ours of the opportunity to preserve and enhance public parks.

The reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund is an encouraging step toward treating our nation’s parks the way they should be treated. But there’s still much work to be done. Congress needs to spend the majority of the money allocated in the Land and Water Conservation Fund so that public lands can be protected as effectively and comprehensively as possible.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund is, “one of the most important conservation programs that we have,” Asher said.

National, state, and local parks play a vital role in our communities. The parks in Onondaga County stimulate economic activity and improve our quality of life.

For the long-term health of the county, for our generation and future generations, we must pressure politicians to act so our public lands are protected.

Noah Goldmann is a sophomore mathematics major and political science and music performance minor. His column appears every other week. He can be reached at nggoldma@syr.edu.

Published on February 28, 2019 at 12:02 am