Liberal group says White House should use Gulf of Mexico auction to secure parks spending

The Obama administration should postpone an August auction of Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leases in a bid to pressure Congress into reauthorizing a 50-year-old conservation program funded by coastal drilling, a liberal think tank argued Wednesday. The strategy, laid out by the Center for American Progress, would have the Interior Department using the upcoming offshore auction as leverage for the Land and Water Conservation Fund that helps support parks, trails and historic sites nationwide. The LWCF is set to expire Sept. 30 unless Congress reauthorizes it. If the fund disappears, CAP senior fellow Matt Lee-Ashley argues, Congress would be breaking a sacred promise it made when creating the LWCF in 1965: that the impacts of offshore drilling would be partly mitigated by investing some of the resulting revenue to parks, open spaces and recreational areas. “The Obama administration can save America’s best parks program, but it will need to engage in a bold fight for the basic idea that underpins the LWCF: Investment in conservation should be a condition for offshore drilling,” Lee-Ashley said. Currently, up to $900 million each year can go to the fund, with almost all of it siphoned from the oil and gas royalties companies pay the federal government for offshore production. But the bonus bids energy companies pay for tracts during the Aug. 19 sale of western Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leases might not be used to supply the LWCF if the fund expires in September. “Over its 50-year history, revenues from offshore drilling have helped conserve more than 7 million acres of land and funded more than 40,000 parks and preservation projects, from building new baseball diamonds to saving Civil War battlegrounds,” Lee-Ashley notes. The Land and Water Conservation Fund is the principal source of money for land acquisition by four federal agencies, including the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service. It also provides matching grants to help states build outdoor recreational facilities and buy new lands and waters for recreation. Some $17 billion has flowed through the LWCF through the program’s history...more