Legislature seeing activity steadily grow

Greetings from Boise at the close of week six of the 61st Legislative session. Activity here has been steadily growing, and we are all hopeful that this may be the halfway mark of this session. I have been working on a number of bills ranging from school sports event concussion laws to legislative ethics reform. There are, however, some issues that are very ripe at the moment and their outcomes will affect the future activities and management of large tracts of land right here in Bonner and Boundary counties.

I have been working to identify and develop measures that may provide a way out of this head long federal taking activity.

There has been an increasing tendency to simply throw our hands in the air and wish to simply nullify any measure that we see as an over-reach of the federal government. I believe that we must first lay out and identify the problem to Congress before we abandon due process.

The failure of Congress to reexamine, reform and reauthorize our nation’s major environmental laws, particularly the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, has resulted in a court takeover of species and public land management responsibilities. Congress must reclaim its constitutional role over the management of species and public lands from overzealous federal agencies and a federal judiciary that is becoming increasingly activist every day.

The problem is that the Federal Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) continues to authorize the expenditure of countless taxpayer funds to pay attorney’s fees for the management of federal public lands and species through the courts. Further, the same organizations that receive taxpayer funds for lawsuits via the EAJA are forcing federal agencies, through the courts, to vastly expand the number of protected species and habitats regardless of whether a species has been added to the federal listing for endangered or threatened species or is deserving of such protection. The listing, or potential listing, of species including wolves, sage grouse and slickspot peppergrass poses a direct threat to the economic livelihood of ranchers across the state of Idaho, and the vast expansion of listed species has the potential to cause immeasurable financial harm to our economy and severely curtail recreational opportunities across the state. Additional federal laws such as the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act are causing increased and unnecessary regulatory burdens on local communities, resource users, recreationalists and the economy of host regions.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering dramatic new regulatory constraints on the enjoyment of man-made water bodies such as Lake Lowell and Lake Walcott, and right here in our back yard they are considering new regulations and constraints on hundreds of thousands of acres in Bonner and Boundary Counties for caribou without adequate scientific justification. In these two counties, 65,000 acres of that land is Idaho School Endowment Land, and prime resource timber which has provided untold millions of dollars to our schools. These new regulations may bring to an end this secure revenue stream.

It should be noted that the federal authorization for the Endangered Species Act expired on Oct. 1, 1992, and that federal, state and local governments are enjoined in constitutional duty and fiduciary responsibility to provide all available remedies to protect the economy, customs, culture, public safety and public health of the citizenry.

Our federal legislators have long recognized and championed reforms to the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Equal Access to Justice Act that would limit the role of the courts in the management of species and public lands and recognize the important role that states and local units of government should play in species and land management decisions.

The next move is to memorialize these findings and present them to Congress and the Executive Branch and to forcefully direct the land management agencies to utilize free market principles such as cost-benefit analysis and peer review of the science involved in their decision making and to respect the concept of multiple use in the management of federal lands.

Thank you for allowing me to share a few of my thoughts on these issues, and feel free to contact me.

Rep. Eric Anderson, R-Priest River, serves District 2 in the Idaho House of Representatives. He can be reached at eanderson@house.idaho.gov.