For Immediate Release

June 17, 2004

HOUSE CLEARS INTERIOR SPENDING BILL

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The House of Representatives approved the Interior Appropriations bill today, endorsing the measure that boosts funding for National Park operations by $55 million more than current year funding, according to U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks.

          The congressman said the legislation represents an effort to reverse the decline in funds for park activities that has occurred despite slight increases in Park Service funding over the past few years.   Without the reallocation of funds that he and Interior Subcommittee Chairman Charles Taylor (R-NC) inserted into the bill during initial consideration in the House, Dicks said that 241 out of the 388 National Park units would have seen operational budget reductions in the next year. 

            The erosion of the operations budgets for the parks, he noted, has occurred because mandatory pay increases and new terrorism-related security costs have more than exceeded any increases in the overall Park Service budgets. 

            The bill approved today will also allocate a total of $471 million for reducing the backlog of maintenance activities in the parks, he said.

            In addition to funding the National Park Service, the Interior spending bill also funds the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and several energy conservation accounts in the U.S. Department of Energy. 

            It also continues a sustained program of restoring salmon habitat throughout federally-owned lands in the Pacific Northwest, an effort launched by Rep. Dicks to restore culverts affecting fish passage along streams and rivers, and a program of identifying hatchery raised salmon stocks in order to protect threatened and endangered species.  This "mass marking" program has been implemented in the past year, allowing hatchery fish to be visibly distinguished by using automated machinery to clip the small, unused adipose fin on each fish.  The Interior funding bill for the next year contains another increment of funding in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and in the Fish & Wildlife budgets to continue this important work, the congressman said.

            The bill also includes two important land acquisitions that are priority requests from the Cascades Conservation Partnership in the Pacific Northwest:  $1.6 allocated from the Forest Service's Forest Legacy program for the Cedar-Green Forest project and $1.3 million to acquire lands nearby Mount Rainier National Park along the Carbon River.

            It contains another critical element of the Elwha River restoration project, which will remove the two dams on the Elwha River and restore one of Washington's historically productive salmon-rearing rivers.  Rep. Dicks said that the Interior bill for the next fiscal year contains $26.9 million.   Thus far, the federal government has appropriated a total of $126.7 million for the project in the past several years, Rep. Dicks said.

            Addressing another important environmental challenge in Washington State, Rep. Dicks said the bill includes $350,000 to continue a study of the dissolved oxygen problem in Hood Canal.  A similar amount was included in the Interior bill this year, Rep. Dicks said, and he secured an additional $500,000 in the State and Tribal Assistance Grant program in another appropriations account to contribute to the joint effort to investigate the low levels of dissolved oxygen in the Canal, and earlier this week was successful in including another $2 million in the Defense Appropriations bill to support the Hood Canal research project.

            In a related move, Rep. Dicks inserted another $1.4 million for the spartina grass elimination program in Willapa Bay, representing the third year of the federal effort to fight the spartina infestation that imperils migratory birds in the area.  The state of Washington is also involved in the spartina control effort, Rep. Dicks said.

            Another $10 million was included for settlement of a boundary dispute involving the Quinault Tribe resolving the longstanding ownership issue.

            A complete listing of Washington State items in the Interior bill follows:

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