Public lands package passes

A package of more than 100 bills that would increase conservation and access to the outdoors nationwide passed the U.S. Senate 92-8 on Tuesday.

Senate Bill 47, which now heads to the U.S. House of Representatives, is the culmination of years of negotiations in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which includes Colorado’s Republican Sen. Cory Gardner.

The package includes nine Colorado-specific bills and the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The LWCF collects money from offshore oil and gas drilling and spends it on projects that improve outdoor recreation. Its authorization expired in September.

“After four years of working on this issue, the Senate was finally able to permanently reauthorize the crown jewel of conservation programs …,” Gardner said in a statement. “The program has a direct impact on public lands in Colorado and will be used to protect our state’s natural beauty for future generations.”

The LWCF has spent $270 million in Colorado to buy private lands that abut or block access to public lands and make projects such as the Continental Divide Trail and Golden Gate Canyon State Park realities.

Gardner said during a floor speech before Tuesday’s vote that Colorado has about 250,000 acres of public lands that people still can’t access.

“That’s basically the same amount of land as Rocky Mountain National Park that can’t be used to hike, to hunt, to fish even though it belongs to the American people,” he said.

The Colorado-specific bills included ones studying the feasibility of making the Amache internment site for Word War II JapaneseAmericans part of the National Park System and including early 1800s explorer Zebulon Pike’s route across the West and Midwest in the National Trails System.

Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet had hoped to include four more bills, including one that would protect nearly 61,000 acres of the San Juan mountain range. He tried to add them via amendment called the CORE Act but wasn’t successful.

“We support the CORE Act, but not as an amendment to the public lands bill,” said Tracy StoneManning, a vice president at the National Wildlife Federation. “The public lands bill — with the vital permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund — is long overdue and needs to be passed as quickly as possible. We don’t want to jeopardize its passage with amendments.”

However, a state conservation group was critical of Gardner for not getting CORE added to the package of bills passed Tuesday.

“In a state where threequarters of voters consider themselves outdoor recreation enthusiasts, Senator Gardner missed another major chance that his colleagues in Utah and New Mexico took advantage of: to conserve thousands of new acres of public lands,” Conservation Colorado executive director Kelly Nordini said in a statement.

The next hurdle for the public lands package will be the House Natural Resources Committee.