A National Priority Renewed

During his State of the Union address and in the days preceding it, President Clinton made a number of good proposals, among them to reinvigorate our commitment to preserving our nation’s natural resources and ensuring that our quality of life is enhanced by a clean, visually pleasing and well-planned environment.

Several of the initiatives the president highlighted seem to have been designed for those of us who visit the Santa Monica Mountains and who fought for the Ventura County SOAR (Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources) initiatives. In the week before the State of the Union, the president and vice president announced the Lands Legacy Initiative, which would expand federal efforts to preserve natural treasures, and the Livability Agenda, which promises to counteract urban sprawl with open space preservation and improved community and traffic planning.

Foremost, of course, is the $5 million the president is requesting for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area, a project he has made one of his top five environmental priorities.

The Lands Legacy Initiative would provide $1 billion--the largest one-year investment ever in the protection of U.S. land resources--to protect those pieces of our natural environment that are the most sensitive, threatened and ecologically valuable. The initiative would also provide funds to protect urban parks and greenways, coastlines and oceans.

Although nearly half of this money would be used to buy federal parkland, wildlife refuges, forests and historic trails, the other half would be awarded to state and local governments on a competitive basis. These awards would help to plan for and acquire land and easements for the development of urban parks and greenways and for the preservation of critical wildlife habitat and coastal wetlands.

Matching grants would be made available to states, communities and land trusts for the purchase of permanent conservation easements on farmland threatened by development.

For Ventura County this could add new meaning to the song “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Millions of dollars would also be made available to expand urban forests and to renovate parks in urban neighborhoods.

In addition to protecting America’s land resources, the president has proposed funds to address growth management issues that are confronting communities nationwide. The president’s Livability Agenda would help provide the money needed at the local level to make sound transportation and planning decisions, so that local leaders and residents could develop and implement the solutions.

By delivering tools and resources to states, counties and cities, where issues of growth are most appropriately addressed, the initiative would help ensure more livable communities for all of us.

Too often, local leaders have good ideas but not the resources to implement them. And too often, the response of the federal government is to provide programs intended to solve the problem while ignoring the ideas of those who know the issues best--local leaders.

As a certified public accountant, I am, of course, concerned with cost. Much of the funding for the Lands Legacy Initiative would come from $900 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which draws from revenue from federal offshore oil sales. Funds for the Livability Agenda would come from a new, local financing tool called Build America Bonds. This financing tool would generate $9.5 billion in bond authority for investments by state and local governments, but only for projects for which taxpayers were willing to provide substantial resources.

These bonds could then be used to preserve green space, create or restore urban parks, protect water quality and clean up contaminated commercial and industrial sites. The Livability Agenda would also be funded through the budgets of other federal agencies, such as the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would provide $8.3 billion and $50 million, respectively, to fund the president’s proposal.

We must remember that none of these ideas is yet reality. They will be part of the president’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2000, which was presented to the public and to Congress last week.

I will examine the details in the new budget, ensuring that the numbers really do add up and that the proposals really do focus on the needs of our communities. As anyone in business knows, the devil is indeed in the details.

If the proposals make fiscal sense for the Conejo, Las Virgenes and San Fernando valleys, and will provide needed land acquisition dollars for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, then I will fight for them. If the proposals become law, I will then work with local leaders to direct as much of that money here as possible--and to get the state funds necessary to take advantage of those partially funded federal programs.