Crapo touts collaboration on public lands management

SANDPOINT — Federal officials’ firmly entrenched belief that they know how best to manage public lands will prevent them relinquishing control, U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo said.

“It’s an uphill battle in Washington,” Crapo told Bonner County commissioners on Tuesday.

Crapo said there’s “very little chance” politically that federal officials could be persuaded to give up control of public lands due to long-held beliefs that states or counties are either unwilling or unable to properly manage them.

“The notion that the federal government is a better land manager than the state or the counties has been perennially disproven,” Crapo said.

However, Crapo supports collaborative efforts at the state level and a separate bill by U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador that seeks to give the state more influence on the management of timber lands.

“The idea of allowing the states to manage the land to the standards that the federal government has already established is one that I think has a lot of merit,” he said.

Commission Chairman Cary Kelly asked Crapo about the status of establishing the Scotchman Peak wilderness area.

“It’s one of these things that have a lot of support here,” added Kelly.

Crapo said he was not personally in favor of doing more wilderness legislation unless there is a broad consensus, something that Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness has spent years establishing in Idaho and Montana.

But wilderness designations continue to be overshadowed by other issues in Congress, such as the federal debt crisis and rancorous debate over health care.

Crapo told commissioners the debt crisis can be surmounted by reforming the federal tax code and controlling spending on entitlement and non-entitlement programs.

“And we need to adopt budget controls that would force Congress to stick with whatever budget we pass,” he said.

National health care reform, meanwhile, is putting an even greater burden on the county’s budget and taxpayers, said Commissioner Glen Bailey.

“We were being faced with, if we wanted to maintain the same level of health care, about a 38-percent increase in premiums and costs to the county,” said Bailey. “That’s been huge.”

Crapo, a long-standing opponent of President Barack Obama’s health care policy, said assurances that it would increase access and quality of health care while reducing medical and insurance costs have not come to fruition.

Crapo contends the president’s sales pitch is built on flawed theories and the public is taking notice.

“The American public’s attitude is starting to shift dramatically,” said Crapo.