U.S. Budget Negotiators Approve Public Lands Boost
By Vicki Allen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional and White House negotiators agreed to provide $12 billion over six years to expand national parks, protect environmentally-sensitive areas and maintain and improve parks and historic sites in a deal completed on Friday.

The plan to set aside some $2 billion annually over six years was part of a $19 billion bill to fund federal lands and cultural programs next fiscal year. Negotiators crafted it during the week.

Part of the fiscal 2001 federal budget that the Republican-led Congress and President Clinton are negotiating, the bill requires final approval from both the House and Senate before being sent to the White House, which embraced it.

``The bill represents an historic breakthrough in conservation funding,'' George Frampton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told reporters. ``In our view it's really a fantastic step forward.''

The plan to dedicate money to buy and protect environmentally-important lands was an outgrowth of a more sweeping $3 billion-a-year plan that cleared the House by a wide margin but stalled in the Senate.

Some supporters of the House-passed plan were outraged by the compromise, which they said resulted from a small minority of senators who insisted on killing the larger effort.

``There is a large bipartisan coalition out there that is extremely upset,'' said an aide to House Resources Committee Chairman Don Young, an Alaska Republican.

``The Interior Appropriations Committee has substituted end-of-the-year smoke and mirrors for the Conservation and Reinvestment Act,'' said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski, another Alaska Republican.

But Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington, top Democrat on the House Interior Appropriations subcommittee, said the compromise he pushed successfully was a breakthrough.

``This is the largest increase in conservation programs ever approved by Congress,'' Dicks said.

Clinton, who has fought with Congress repeatedly over his demands to protect more environmentally-important areas, also backed the broader House plan.

The program mainly would use money from leasing federal lands and offshore for oil and natural gas production and would distribute it among buying additional park lands, state conservation programs, urban and historic preservation, coastal and fisheries programs, and maintenance programs.

The interior spending bill also has $1.6 billion in emergency funds to help western states struck by the summer's unusually bad wildfire season and to try to better control them next year.

The White House had threatened to veto the bill, citing ''anti-environmental riders'' such as blocks on studying breaching dams in the Pacific Northwest's Snake River and delaying new regulations for hardrock mining.

But Frampton said he believed those either were out of the bill, or changed to have minimal effect.