In late February, the U.S. House of Representatives moved to save the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), approving a sweeping package of public lands bills that includes a measure to permanently reauthorize the program for the first time in its 54-year-history.
The package, approved by the Senate earlier in February with near-unanimous support, puts an end to the cycle of expiration and renewal LWCF has suffered in recent years. The fund last expired in September, prompting a bipartisan group of lawmakers to push for permanent reauthorization. Montana’s congressional delegates were key drivers of this effort to get the package to the president’s desk. We’re grateful to Senators Steve Daines and Jon Tester for their hard work to pass this bill in the Senate and for Congressman Greg Gianforte’s advocacy in the House of Representatives.
For decades, the LWCF has been quietly protecting public access to the great outdoors in Montana. LWCF directs money from offshore oil drilling federal royalties—not tax dollars—to conservation, public access and recreation priorities across America. Over the last decade alone, Montana has benefited from more than $240 million in LWCF funds to invest in recreation, public lands, working forests and clean water.
The program helped Montana communities purchase more than 800 recreation sites such as city parks, trails and ball fields. It helped the state and communities to secure 165 fishing access sites and allowed public entities like Glacier National Park to purchase privately held inholdings that were causing management headaches.
In the Blackfoot watershed and all across Montana, the fund has helped to keep working lands intact and in the hands of ranching families through conservation easements with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And as land values soared in the beautiful Blackfoot watershed and timber companies began to move their land out of timber production, LWCF helped to keep those lands open to public access. The fund has played a critical role in resolving the checkerboard of public-private ownership that was complicating management of Montana’s forests.
In 2016, LWCF funds supported two projects to return former timberland to public ownership. The first added more than 700 acres of former timberland to the Nevada Creek Wildlife Management Area, nearly doubling its size and providing a new access point to land on the Helena National Forest. Later that year, a deal between The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) placed 5,500 acres of former timberland above the Blackfoot River into public ownership. The property, located just north of the Belmont Creek fishing access site, helps to secure the Blackfoot River recreation corridor.
Over the next few years, The Nature Conservancy plans to use LWCF funds again to secure wildlife habitat and recreational access in areas with hundreds of miles of beautiful snowmobile trails and other recreational opportunities. We are working toward projects that will permanently protect Wisherd Ridge and the checkerboard area west of Placid Lake. These projects will prevent scattered private development in fire-prone areas and make sure that recreational lands won’t be locked away behind private gates.
The Nature Conservancy welcomes your questions and comments. Please contact Chris Bryant: (406) 532-4477, cbryant@nature.org
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