John,
This coming Saturday is National Public Lands Day. Maybe Congress will celebrate it by allocating the maximum legal amount of money to the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).
You know as well as I do — that’s not going to happen.
The only way Congress will fully fund the LWCF is if we keep the pressure on with our lobbying efforts, our publicity campaigns, and anything else we can think of to make our elected representatives do the right thing.
As you may know, the LWCF is the single most important source of conservation funding our nation has. For the last 55 years, it has been used to protect public lands such as parks, forests, and wildlife refuges; to support working farms and ranches; to preserve historical and cultural sites; and to build parks, playgrounds, and recreational areas.
Many of the projects we at The Trust for Public Land have completed thanks to our members over the years would not have happened without LWCF funding.
According to law, Congress can allocate as much as $900 million — of non-taxpayer money — to the fund every year. Yet for decades, it hasn’t even come close to that amount. In fact, the total amount of money appropriated to the LWCF since it began averages out to about $340 million per year, little more than one-third of what it was due.
We still don’t know what the LWCF will get in 2020 … but we know it won’t be great. The budget proposed by the House of Representatives sets out $524 million, and it seems unlikely the final figure will be any higher than that. President Trump’s proposed budget contains no funding for the LWCF at all!
Thanks to the support of our dedicated members, we have managed to increase LWCF allocations by 65 percent over the past five years. By any measure, that is a fantastic success. But as you can see, we still have a long way to go — another $376 million at minimum.
That’s why I’m asking you to become a member The Trust for Public Land right now with a gift, to power our work to gain full funding for the LWCF, celebrate National Public Lands Day, and support all the vital work we do.
Sincerely,
Kim Elliot
Director of Membership
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