[House Report 113-337]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
113th Congress Rept. 113-337
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
2d Session Part 1
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RECREATIONAL FISHING AND HUNTING HERITAGE AND OPPORTUNITIES ACT
_______
January 31, 2014.--Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the
State of the Union and ordered to be printed
_______
Mr. Hastings of Washington, from the Committee on Natural Resources,
submitted the following
R E P O R T
together with
DISSENTING VIEWS
[To accompany H.R. 1825]
[Including cost estimate of the Congressional Budget Office]
The Committee on Natural Resources, to whom was referred
the bill (H.R. 1825) to direct Federal public land management
officials to exercise their authority under existing law to
facilitate use of and access to Federal public lands for
fishing, sport hunting, and recreational shooting, and for
other purposes, having considered the same, report favorably
thereon without amendment and recommend that the bill do pass.
PURPOSE OF THE BILL
The purpose of H.R. 1825 is to direct Federal public land
management officials to exercise their authority under existing
law to facilitate use of and access to Federal public lands for
fishing, sport hunting, and recreational shooting.
BACKGROUND AND NEED FOR LEGISLATION
H.R. 1825, the Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage
and Opportunities Act, clarifies federal authorities and
policies for the management of hunting and fishing on public
lands. It provides additional protections for continued public
access to public land for the purpose of recreational fishing,
hunting, and shooting sports on U.S. Forest Service (FS) and
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. The provisions of H.R.
1825 require federal land managers to support and facilitate
public use and access for hunting, fishing and recreational
shooting and create an ``open until closed'' management regime
for these activities on FS and BLM land, but does not give
these uses priority over other multiple uses. It requires an
evaluation of the impact on hunting, fishing and recreational
shooting in land and resource planning and eliminates
redundancies in environmental review of hunting, fishing and
recreational shooting opportunities. The bill restates, in
unambiguous language, Congress' consistent position that BLM
and FS lands designated as wilderness, wilderness eligible, or
suitable and primitive or semi-primitive areas are open to all
legal forms of hunting, fishing and recreational shooting
unless there are good reasons to close such areas. It also
forecloses opportunities for continued nuisance lawsuits by
classifying hunting, fishing and recreational shooting as
``necessary'' to meet the minimum requirements for the
administration of wilderness.
Although Congress has spoken many times on the issue of
hunting, fishing and shooting sports on our multiple-use public
lands and has always come down on the side of allowing these
sporting activities to take place under state laws, these
activities continue to come under attack and legal challenge
from groups that are opposed to hunting in general as well as
from those who seek to restrict these activities in designated
wilderness areas. By clarifying the statutory obligations of
land managing agencies, H.R. 1825 protects and fosters fishing,
hunting, and shooting traditions on federal public lands to
ensure that federal land management agencies--primarily the FS
and the BLM--exercise their land management discretion to
facilitate access for sportsmen activities. Under the
provisions of H.R. 1825, these activities will be considered
authorized and approved and thereby limit the ability of anti-
hunting advocacy groups to use any ambiguity in the laws and
force the land managing agencies to defend these activities in
court or through the quagmire of administrative procedures,
diverting resources that could otherwise be used for public
recreation and wildlife conservation activities.
The provisions of H.R. 1825 are needed to restore the legal
status quo that prevailed for decades until a small number of
federal court cases--primarily in San Francisco's Ninth
Circuit--effectively rewrote these provisions, disregarded
plain language enacted by Congress as well as years of
established precedent and practice by professional federal land
managers. Wildlife conservation, for example, is the primary
mission of all National Wildlife Refuge units. Consistent with
these purposes, for decades the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
(FWS) and the Arizona Department of Game and Fish (AZGF) along
with private conservationists constructed and maintained water
``guzzlers'' in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona to
enhance and maintain bighorn sheep populations. When Congress
designated portions of Kofa as wilderness in the 1980s, it
recognized these activities and concluded that the water for
wildlife program on Kofa was consistent with the
``supplemental'' purposes of wilderness as expressly set forth
in section 4(a) of the 1964 Wilderness Act (Public Law 88-577;
16 U.S.C. Sec. 1133(a)).
Nevertheless, in 2007, activists sued FWS to terminate the
water for wildlife program and remove the guzzlers on the
grounds that Kofa was a wilderness first (and no structures
were to be permitted) and a wildlife refuge established for the
conservation of bighorn sheep second. FWS and wildlife
conservationists strongly disagreed. A U.S. District court
upheld FWS and AZGF and allowed the water-for-wildlife program
to continue. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
did not. H.R. 1825 merely reiterates the plain language of the
1964 Wilderness Act that its purposes are ``supplemental'' to
the primary purposes of the underlying federal land
designation--in this case a wildlife refuge. This change,
necessitated by judicial disregard of plain statutory language,
is not a change in the Wilderness Act but restoration of the
legal status quo that existed from 1964 until 2010.
In certain other cases, Ninth Circuit decisions also
overruled professional agency determinations and disregarded
long-established understandings of the ``necessity'' standard
set forth in section 4(c) of the 1964 Wilderness Act. To ensure
that anti-fishing/anti-hunting activists may not use these
recent court precedents to attack fishing or hunting within
wilderness areas as not being ``necessary,'' H.R. 1825
specifies that opportunities to fish and hunt on wilderness
lands are in fact ``necessary.'' Nothing in this language,
tailored to reverse inappropriate judicial activism, authorizes
any forms of roads or mechanized vehicle access in these units.
Nothing in the bill includes any references to allowing,
directly or indirectly, roads or vehicles in wilderness areas.
Section 4(e) clearly states that this necessity determination
provision, ``shall not authorize or facilitate commodity
development, use or extraction, motorized recreational access
or use that is not otherwise allowed under the Wilderness Act
(16 U.S.C. 1131 et seq.), or permanent road construction or
maintenance within designated wilderness areas.''
A similar problem with regard to the National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA) is also corrected in the bill. Again, H.R.
1825 is narrowly tailored to fix a problem created by judicial
disregard of previously enacted law. In this case, the 1997
Refuge Improvement Act (which passed the House with one
dissenting vote and was signed into law by President Clinton)
provided that fishing and hunting were ``priority public uses''
on National Wildlife Refuge units and that FWS would facilitate
these uses by preparing Comprehensive Conservation Plans (CCPs)
for each Refuge. Per the Act, the environmental effects of
fishing and hunting would be assessed and evaluated in these
CCPs.
Six years later animal rights activists filed suit seeking
to close hunting on over 50 Refuges. They argued the CCPs
weren't enough to satisfy NEPA. FWS argued that no purpose
would be served, and finite time and money wasted, by assessing
the ``cumulative effects,'' for example, of deer hunting on
Georgia's Bond Swamp Refuge, woodcock hunting in the Canaan
Valley Refuge in West Virginia, duck hunting on a North Dakota
refuge, and moose hunting on a remote Alaska unit. None of the
activities were in fact connected so there could be no
cumulative effects. This fell on deaf ears in the courtroom and
a D.C. federal court sided with the anti-hunting activists by
ordering FWS to prepare additional cumulative effects
assessments. FWS proceeded to spend the next three years
wasting thousands of hours and dollars to prepare these
unnecessary cumulative effects assessments. H.R. 1825
reiterates the intent of the 1997 Refuge Act that the CCPs are
sufficient to satisfy NEPA and spare FWS the time and cost of
preparing superfluous cumulative effects analyses of these
priority public uses. It is far better for the FWS to target
its resources at on-the-ground conservation and management of
the National Wildlife Refuge System.
The conservation movement was started by American sportsmen
a century ago and since then almost all of our most successful
wildlife conservation programs have been associated with
recreational hunting and fishing. Species that were once rare,
such as wild turkeys, deer, bear and wood ducks, are now
plentiful as a result of private efforts by sportsmen and
scientific management by state fish and game departments. H. R.
1825 supports sound wildlife conservation and recognizes the
conservation benefits of protecting and extending recreational
sporting activities.
COMMITTEE ACTION
H.R. 1825 was introduced on May 3, 2013 by Congressman Dan
Benishek (R-MI). The bill was referred to the Committee on
Natural Resources, and within the Committee to the
Subcommittees on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation and
Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans, and Insular Affairs. The bill was
additionally referred to the Committee on Agriculture. On May
9, 2013, the Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental
Regulation held a hearing on the bill. On June 12, 2013, the
Natural Resources Committee met to consider the bill. The
Subcommittees were discharged by unanimous consent. Congressman
DeFazio (D-OR) offered amendment designated .027 to the bill;
the amendment was not adopted by a rollcall vote of 18 to 24,
as follows:
Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) offered amendment
designated .046 to the bill; the amendment was not adopted by a
bipartisan rollcall vote of 15 to 26, as follows:
The bill was then adopted and ordered favorably reported to
the House of Representatives by a bipartisan rollcall vote of
28 to 15, as follows:
COMMITTEE OVERSIGHT FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Regarding clause 2(b)(1) of rule X and clause 3(c)(1) of
rule XIII of the Rules of the House of Representatives, the
Committee on Natural Resources' oversight findings and
recommendations are reflected in the body of this report.
COMPLIANCE WITH HOUSE RULE XIII
1. Cost of Legislation. Clause 3(d)(1) of rule XIII of the
Rules of the House of Representatives requires an estimate and
a comparison by the Committee of the costs which would be
incurred in carrying out this bill. However, clause 3(d)(2)(B)
of that rule provides that this requirement does not apply when
the Committee has included in its report a timely submitted
cost estimate of the bill prepared by the Director of the
Congressional Budget Office under section 402 of the
Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Under clause 3(c)(3) of rule
XIII of the Rules of the House of Representatives and section
403 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the Committee has
received the following cost estimate for this bill from the
Director of the Congressional Budget Office:
H.R. 1825--Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage and Opportunities
Act
H.R. 1825 would require federal land management agencies to
provide access to certain federal lands for hunting, fishing,
and recreational shooting activities. The bill also would
require those agencies to prepare annual reports identifying
lands that have been closed to such activities. Based on
information provided by the affected agencies, CBO estimates
that implementing the legislation would have no significant
impact on the federal budget. Enacting H.R. 1825 would not
affect direct spending or revenues; therefore, pay-as-you-go
procedures do not apply.
Because the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service,
and other land management agencies have the authority to allow
hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting on lands under
their jurisdictions, CBO expects that implementing the bill
would not significantly affect agency operations. In addition,
the activities necessary to complete the annual reports
required under the bill are similar to activities performed by
the affected agencies under current law. Therefore, we estimate
that implementing the legislation would have no significant
impact on the budgets of those agencies.
H.R. 1825 contains no intergovernmental or private-sector
mandates as defined in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act and
would not affect the budgets of state, local, or tribal
governments.
The CBO staff contact for this estimate is Jeff LaFave. The
estimate was approved by Theresa Gullo, Deputy Assistant
Director for Budget Analysis.
2. Section 308(a) of Congressional Budget Act. As required
by clause 3(c)(2) of rule XIII of the Rules of the House of
Representatives and section 308(a) of the Congressional Budget
Act of 1974, this bill does not contain any new budget
authority, spending authority, credit authority, or an increase
or decrease in revenues or tax expenditures. Based on
information provided by the affected agencies, CBO estimates
that implementing the legislation would have no significant
impact on the federal budget.
3. General Performance Goals and Objectives. As required by
clause 3(c)(4) of rule XIII, the general performance goal or
objective of this bill is to direct Federal public land
management officials to exercise their authority under existing
law to facilitate use of and access to Federal public lands for
fishing, sport hunting, and recreational shooting.
EARMARK STATEMENT
This bill does not contain any Congressional earmarks,
limited tax benefits, or limited tariff benefits as defined
under clause 9(e), 9(f), and 9(g) of rule XXI of the Rules of
the House of Representatives.
COMPLIANCE WITH PUBLIC LAW 104-4
This bill contains no unfunded mandates.
COMPLIANCE WITH H. RES. 5
Directed Rule Making. The Chairman does not believe that
this bill directs any executive branch official to conduct any
specific rule-making proceedings.
Duplication of Existing Programs. This bill does not
establish or reauthorize a program of the federal government
known to be duplicative of another program. Such program was
not included in any report from the Government Accountability
Office to Congress pursuant to section 21 of Public Law 111-139
or identified in the most recent Catalog of Federal Domestic
Assistance published pursuant to the Federal Program
Information Act (Public Law 95-220, as amended by Public Law
98-169) as relating to other programs.
PREEMPTION OF STATE, LOCAL OR TRIBAL LAW
This bill is not intended to preempt any State, local or
tribal law.
CHANGES IN EXISTING LAW
If enacted, this bill would make no changes in existing
law.
DISSENTING VIEWS
For generations, American families have taken advantage of
the hunting and fishing opportunities on the majority of
federal public lands. As consistent supporters of recreation on
public lands including hunting and fishing, among other
activities, we have welcomed the opportunity to work with all
stakeholders to ensure that future generations can continue
this great tradition by ensuring access, as well as ensuring
proper, sustainable management to maintain the balance of
competing interests.
Opportunities to hunt and fish on public land are abundant.
These activities are already allowed in designated wilderness
areas and in wildlife refuges. Proponents of this bill are
simply interested in an ideological agenda of rolling back
environmental protections as well as removing landmark
conservation laws that have protected our treasured public
lands for decades.
Because of the wide-ranging support for hunting and
fishing, H.R. 1825 could be bipartisan, noncontroversial
legislation. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the goal
of this measure.
Rather, H.R. 1825 includes sweeping provisions that would
undermine the Wilderness Act, National Environmental Policy Act
(NEPA) and the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration
Act. For example, Section 4(e)(1) would permit temporary roads,
motorized equipment and motorboats, use of motor vehicles,
landing of aircraft, structures and installations, and other
forms of mechanical transport in designated wilderness if it is
to support and facilitate recreational fishing, hunting, and
shooting opportunities. This section could threaten the
wilderness characteristics of some of America's wildest and
most treasured places.
The bill also waives NEPA for all decisions regarding
amendments to land use plans or refuge conservation plans
concerning hunting or fishing. While these activities are
appropriate uses of public lands, they clearly have impacts on
those lands and the general public, including hunters and
fishermen, should be consulted on those decisions through NEPA
and other laws.
H.R. 1825 uses an issue on where there is broad agreement--
the importance of hunting and fishing on public lands--as cover
to make unnecessary changes to landmark conservation laws. If
enacted, H.R. 1825 could destroy the wilderness character of
many designated wilderness areas and permanently alter wildlife
refuge management. As a result, enactment of H.R. 1825 would
destroy wildlife habitat, severely limiting opportunities for
the recreational pursuits the bill claims to protect.
We support hunting and fishing on federal lands and we
stand ready to work constructively with the Majority to promote
and enhance responsible recreational opportunities. H.R. 1825
does neither.
Peter DeFazio,
Ranking Member, Committee on
Natural Resources.
Raul Grijalva,
Ranking Member, Subcommittee
on Public Lands and
Environmental
Regulation.