Congress has passed a bill to keep the federal government funded for the rest of the fiscal year. The bill is a few thousand pages. Alaska Public Media Washington correspondent Liz Ruskin boils it down for Alaska listeners, with News Director Lori Townsend.
RUSKIN: I want to start (by) telling you what’s not in the bill. And that is Tongass logging riders. We’ve been expecting for weeks that Sen. (Lisa) Murkowski would get a couple of provisions in this bill to support … continued logging in the Tongass National Forest. And those riders aren’t in the bill. We were expecting an exemption for the Tongass from the Roadless Rule. That’s not in the bill.
TOWNSEND: The Roadless Rule – remind us what that is.
RUSKIN: The Roadless Rule stems from the Clinton administration, the last days of the Clinton administration. Basically, it bans new road-building in (forests) that don’t have roads. But that continues to apply to the Tongass as it did before. Sen. Murkowski did not get an exemption in this spending bill for the Tongass.
Another thing she did not get is a block for the Tongass management plan that she does not like. We were expecting her to block that plan. It’s not in the bill.
TOWNSEND:Â That’s the transition to logging younger trees rather than old-growth, right?
RUSKIN: Yes exactly. And there’s not a block in the bill on that plan. But she did get an instruction … telling the Forest Service not to complete the transition until they complete a tree inventory to show that that there are enough young-growth (trees) to support the industry.
TOWNSEND: All right, a few thousand pages – what IS in the bill for Alaska.
RUSKIN: It doubles the funding for the Denali Commission, bringing it to $30 million. That’s interesting because the Trump administration had proposed to give the Denali Commission a 50 percent cut. And instead they’re getting a 100 percent increase.
And Sen. Murkowski office sent a press release that lists all kinds of other spending on national programs that Alaska benefits from. One of them is the Payment in Lieu of Taxes. That’s a program that supports local governments and compensates them for the federal lands near them that they can’t tax. So that’s called PILT – Payment in Lieu of Taxes. There’s a lot of money for water and wastewater systems in rural areas. And, she points out, a record spending (increase of $498 million) for the Indian Health Service.
And also, as Rep. Don Young points out in his press release, there’s almost $170 million for military construction at Eielson Air Force Base. That’s to prepare for the arrival of the F 35 squadrons.
TOWNSEND: Liz, does anything else stand out to you?
RUSKIN: Well, I did notice $150 million for a new icebreaker. It’s … another incremental step in the process of acquiring one or more new icebreakers, heavy icebreakers. Each one costs around a billion dollars, maybe a little less.
Transcript lightly edited for clarity
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
