Dr. Mower goes to Washington

The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is back -- and our own Board Chair, Dr. Judith C. Mower, helped make it happen!

The budget bill passed by Congress on December 18, 2015 funds the LWCF through September 2018 -- a three year extension in funding.

Back in September, Congress failed to re-authorize the LWCF, America's most successful conservation program. For almost three months, vital projects for parks, playgrounds, trails, forests, and wetlands went unfunded.

Dr. Mower spent two days in Washington, D.C. asking New York Congressional representatives to reauthorize the LWCF and enable the continuation of vital conservation projects throughout the nation. Dr. Mower met with several representatives from upstate New York on Monday, December 15. She recounted the day as follows:

"When I got to Washington, Nick [Miner of The Wilderness Society] handed me off to LWCF coalition lobbyist Amy Lindholm, who accompanied me on all the calls. . . In all I visited with staff members of both our senators and seven representatives . . . I took to each of them PTNY’s latest GreenSpace newsletter and . . . a list of PTNY projects and a sample of LWCF projects in each person’s district."

After a successful day of advocacy, Dr. Mower and her partners in Washington retired to rest up before a second day of meetings. When they awoke the next morning, they discovered that the House and Senate had agreed to an omnibus budget deal in the wee hours of the morning on December 16 -- a deal that included the LWCF!

Dr. Mower thus got the chance to do something that few folks do: thank her lawmakers for a job well-done! After spending Monday asking for the extension of the LWCF, she spent Tuesday thanking them for including the LWCF in the budget.

Although this fight ended well, our work on the LWCF does not end with the conclusion of Dr. Mower's visit. Although a three year extension of the LWCF was a welcome conclusion to the chaos in which the fund found itself last fall, it is still a far cry from the permanent re-authorization for which Parks & Trails New York had worked hard to attain.

We will thus spend the next several years working closely with the LWCF Coalition in Washington to make sure that the LWCF eventually receives full and permanent funding.

In the meantime, please be sure to thank your representatives for supporting the important conservation work of the LWCF! And PTNY would like to spend a special thanks to Board Chair Dr. Judith C. Mower for volunteering her time and talent to ensuring that this crucial conservation program continued for the benefit of all New Yorkers.

DONATE NOW TO OUR CAMPAIGN TO SAVE THE LWCF!

For more on the LWCF, visit our Campaign to Save LWCF page.