Landmark outdoors bill signed into law
The view toward Big Mountain and Haskill Basin from Whitefish. (Heidi Desch/Whitefish Pilot)
President Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act into law last week.
All of Montana’s congressional delegation supported the bill. Montana Sens. Steve Daines, a Republican and Jon Tester, a Democrat, were instrumental in pushing it through the Senate.
The bill would take a maximum of $1.9 billion annually from federal oil and gas lease revenue and apply it annually from fiscal year 2021 until fiscal year 2025 for Park Service deferred maintenance, including transportation projects.
The bill does not allow the Park Service to use the funds to acquire more land.
It also permanently funds the Land, Water and Conservation Fund, which uses money from offshore oil and gas leases for conservation projects.
The LWCF in past years has amounted to hundreds of millions annually, but that’s been at the whims of Congress, which has withheld funds in years past.
The LWCF has been used locally to great effect.
The LWCF played a key role in securing funding for the Whitefish Lake Watershed Project, a 13,400-acre conservation easement northwest of Whitefish Lake. The Haskill Basin conservation easement finalized in 2016 also relied on LWCF funding to ultimately preserve about 3,000 acres of forestland north of town including providing protection for the City of Whitefish’s source for drinking water.
LWCF monies were used to pay, in part, for a massive conservation easement just north of Columbia Falls that protects about 10,000 acres of F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co. from subdivision and development along the south face of the Whitefish Range, while still allowing for timber management.
The LWCF is also seen as critical in an even larger easement deal that would protect about 200,000 acres of land primarily west of Kalispell owned by Southern Pine Plantations from development, while still allowing for timber harvest.