To many people who care about the West’s
publicly owned lands, the Nov. 5 election results fell somewhere
between disastrous and catastrophic.
Voters
handed control of the Senate back to the Republican Party and
enlarged its majority in the House of Representatives, thereby
sweeping away the fragile congressional roadblock that had hampered
Bush administration efforts to poke loopholes into key federal
environmental laws. In post-election conversations with reporters,
environmental activists decried the outcome, one going so far as to
suggest it meant “political Armageddon in the nation’s forests.”
But at the state and local levels, voters also
embraced a remarkable number of ballot measures intended to
preserve wildlife habitat and open space, approving 79 of the 99
such measures nationwide, and authorizing $2.6 billion in public
funding for land acquisition.
Election Day thus
produced a striking dichotomy between the results of Senate and
House races “- which Republican leaders in Washington will be
tempted to regard as a mandate to accelerate drilling and mining on
public lands, and to exempt logging and road construction from
citizen challenges “- and the fate of ballot measures intended to
put more land off-limits to development and resource extraction.
The paradoxical election outcomes suggest that
it is premature, if not inaccurate, to regard the restoration of
single-party dominance in Washington as a referendum on the
drill-and-cut agenda being pressed by many Western lawmakers and
their kindred spirits in the White House. As it so often does,
California skewed the national data. The state’s voters approved
Proposition 50, a $1.5-billion land-acquisition initiative intended
primarily to safeguard watersheds critical to California’s urban
and agricultural water supplies, thereby accounting for 58 percent
of the conservation funding approved nationwide on Nov. 5. Two
other big measures that won approval “- Question 1 in Nevada, which
included $89.5 million for land acquisition, and Question 2 in
Virginia, which included $36.5 million for the same purpose “-
brought the total to more than $1.6 billion. The remaining $1
billion in voter-approved spending was scattered all over the
country, according to the Trust for Public Land and the Land Trust
Alliance, which tracked such measures in 22 states. They included
three local measures in New York worth a total of $315 million and
one worth $221 million in Charleston County, S.C. Other large
measures included $4.5 million in Lake Oswego, Ore.; $19.8 million
in Coconino County, Ariz ; $37 million in Northampton County,
Penn.; $20 million in Dakota County, Minn.; $120 million in Fort
Collins, Colo.; $63.7 million in Collier County, Fla.;.; and $8.4
million Kirkland, Wash.
Not all the measures
that won approval Nov. 5 authorized bonds, a relatively painless
way for voters to spend money since it does not come directly out
of their pockets. Many involved tax increases: Voters in Colorado,
Arizona and Massachusetts, among other states, boosted the sales
tax to buy land; voters in several jurisdictions in Florida,
Michigan, New Jersey and Washington raised the property tax rate;
those in several Pennsylvania communities raised the income tax.
Given the economic doldrums gripping many of
these states, their tax revenues driven down by diminished
corporate earnings and plummeting stock values that have erased
capital gains and eviscerated retirement accounts, the willingness
of voters to spend money was remarkable. Yet the Nov. 5 vote was
not an anomaly. During primary elections earlier this year, voters
in 47 communities in 14 states approved $2.7 billion in
conservation spending.
Many of these
conservation measures won support in parts of the country that were
crucial to President Bush’s 2000 election and to the GOP’s Nov. 5
mid-term victory “- Florida, Colorado, South Carolina, Oregon. This
suggests that the length of Bush’s campaign coattails this fall had
more to do with the electorate’s craving for stability and security
in the face of international threats than an endorsement of his
administration’s efforts to roll back Clinton-era environmental
protections. Rightly or wrongly, voters still tend to regard the
GOP as the party to trust when the shooting starts.
If the shooting doesn’t start, however, they’ll
focus again on other priorities. And given their demonstrated
willingness to open their wallets on Nov. 5, those priorities
include protecting lands they hold dear from exactly the sort of
activities the Bush administration hopes to accelerate.
John Krist is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, as service of High Country News in
Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is senior reporter and opinion page
columnist for the Star in Ventura,
California.
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