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The cost of acquiring new land must be balanced with operations and maintenance costs of current refuge properties.
WASHINGTON— The chairman and several members of a House natural resources subcommittee are questioning the National Wildlife Refuge agency’s plan to acquire more land, saying it focus on the massive backlog of maintenance projects on land it already owns.
But acquiring land to “[conserve] high quality habitat for fish and wildlife is what we do in the refuge system,” said James Kurth, assistant director of the National Wildlife Refuge, at Thursday’s hearing. Determining what land to acquire, and at the expense of how many of the 12,000 backlog projects, is the hard part.
Patuxent Research Refuge in Prince George’s County is one of the more than 540 wildlife refuges at issue because of its list of backlog projects.
At Patuxent, despite the substantial backlog, facility manager Martin Brockman said maintenance projects are still getting done.
“If you came here a year ago, you would’ve seen gates at the visitor’s center entrance road that sometimes opened and sometimes didn’t,” he said in a telephone interview. But unlike other operations and maintenance projects waiting for resources, the $120,000 gate replacement was completed this year.
Brockman, who oversaw the program that identifies operations and maintenance projects for the National Wildlife Refuge system for six years, said officials work very had to make sure the backlog project numbers are correct so that those difficult decisions can be made.
“You have to think like a business,” he said.
But Rep. John Fleming, R-La., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans and Insular Affairs wondered aloud if spending money on acquisition instead of maintenance was like buying more yard when you don’t have a lawnmower for what you have.
Eric Skalac/MNS
The National Wildlife Refuge system acquires land to preserve threatened flora and fauna, to protect watersheds and to save a habitat that would otherwise be lost.
Kurth defended acquisition, not just for preserving threatened habitats, but also as a way to reduce maintenance costs. Purchasing land that’s “internal” to other refuge property can lessen the costs of maintenance tasks like fire fighting and invasive species management because it no longer gets in the way in terms of avoiding private land or establishing borders.
Ultimately, representatives who disagreed with Kurth objected to his formula for allocating funds to the two areas, saying too little weight is given to operations and maintenance projects compared with acquisitions.
“I grew up in the woods and I believe in proper management,” Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Fla., said to Kurth. “But you’re not properly managing.”
Other representatives echoed the sentiment, arguing that acquisition of new land should be greatly reduced, if not halted altogether.
“You have more than you can manage,” Southerland said.