[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 141 (Friday, October 9, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2001-E2004]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  AMERICAN HERITAGE RIVERS INITIATIVE

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. HELEN CHENOWETH

                                of idaho

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 8, 1998

  Mrs. CHENOWETH. Mr. Speaker, I would like to enter into the 
Congressional Record a speech given by Carol LaGrasse of the Property 
Rights Foundation of America to the Eagle Forum National Conference on 
September 12, 1998 in Arlington, Virginia. This speech is one of the 
most insightful discussions about the dangers of the American Heritage 
Rivers Initiative which my bill, H.R. 1842, would terminate. I 
encourage my colleagues to read this outstanding speech and share it 
with their constituents.

  The American Heritage Rivers Program--A Threat to Private Property 
                                 Rights

       Thank you for the opportunity to discuss President 
     Clinton's American Heritage Rivers program, a new federal 
     executive program of designating selected major rivers 
     supposedly to preserve their natural, cultural and historic 
     resources.


                              Introduction

       The American Heritage Rivers program, if successful, 
     promises to diminish local representative government and 
     private property rights. The program is also justifiably 
     opposed because it involves many of the same

[[Page E2002]]

     parties and extreme preservation thinking of international 
     programs such as the un-ratified Convention on Biological 
     Diversity that came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. But I 
     would like to offer an experience that illustrates the need 
     not to concentrate too much on a single focus in opposing 
     designation programs.
       About two years ago, a woman telephoned me at home one 
     morning at 6:30 a.m. She was upset because a land conservancy 
     was going to acquire a tract of forest property from her town 
     of Ellenville, N.Y. Because the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve for 
     the Catskill Mountains, which would have included her town, 
     had recently been defeated, she was concerned about the 
     United Nations. She thought that the property could be 
     somehow going into the hands of the United Nations.
       I said to her that in the long term it could be that if we 
     don't remain in control of our government and matters like 
     this it could very well be that the United Nations would be 
     involved in owning and governing land in the Catskills, but 
     that it was important to oppose the land trust acquisition of 
     the property for other reasons. Usually when that land trust 
     acquires property it is for a flip to government under a 
     prearranged deal, I said. While the land trust owns it it 
     does not pay real estate taxes. They may block hunters and 
     fishermen from using the land and generally keep it in a way 
     that it doesn't serve the public from the area forced to 
     give the tax exemption. When the State acquires the land, 
     the town will have little say in how the tract is managed, 
     and the town will be endlessly in conflict with the State 
     over the tax revenues that should be due on the tract. She 
     said that a meeting about the matter was to be held that 
     very evening, and I suggested that before she left for 
     work she follow through with a discussion with the town 
     supervisor and persuade him to consider these issues.
       She called the Property Rights Foundation back in a day and 
     left the message because no one was in. She said, quoting 
     almost verbatim, ``I called the supervisor and spoke to him. 
     He assured me that the United Nations was not going to 
     acquire the land. I just wanted to let you know that there 
     was nothing to worry about.''
       Please remember this story, because, in one way or another, 
     it illustrates a number of points. The threat from programs 
     which I call land designations, including the UNESCO 
     Biosphere Reserves and the Clinton American Heritage River 
     pronouncements, is not singular, but multitudinous. We should 
     not focus on the long-term, exotic threat to the neglect of 
     the practical, mundane immediate and short-term.
       When you consider that it was I that exposed the UNESCO 
     Biosphere Reserve programs in New York, my husband Peter who 
     with the assistance of my brother at Penn State extract the 
     documents from libraries from New York to Australia to 
     understand the Biosphere Reserve program, and I who was not 
     unjustly blamed for the defeat of the Catskill Mountains 
     Biosphere Reserve, you should not have difficulty accepting 
     my assertion that I have grave concerns about international 
     involvement through such designations. But I consider the 
     sovereignty issue to be one of long-term significance and 
     that at the real and more short-term dangers of such 
     designations, which I will soon be describing, are the 
     essential threat. If we cannot convey these dangers, we do 
     not understand how such designations affect our freedom. We 
     will fail to either monitor them adequately or defeat them. 
     Ultimately, we truly will suffer, in addition, through the 
     loss of national sovereignty. How will this happen? At least 
     in part by more of the same sort of infringements on our 
     rights, imposed by very similar methods. It will be pitiful, 
     indeed, if the day arrives when we lose home-rule and 
     representative government to a form of government which 
     imposes control from beyond our Constitution and borders.


                          fine-sounding goals

       As you know all too well, government programs that can take 
     away your rights are often couched in very desirable terms. A 
     familiar example is that of imposing national education 
     standards for the purpose of solving the problem of school 
     failure. The idea is that we need the federal government 
     because kids aren't reading and doing math at grade level.
       The same system is in vogue for environmental issues. 
     Rivers are portrayed, truthfully or falsely, as badly 
     polluted. Local cultures and historic sites are portrayed as 
     threatened. The beauty of the countryside is being lost to 
     bad land management. Lack of vision and financial resources 
     keeps localities from tackling region-wide issues.
       The federal government is seen as visionary enough, 
     geographically big enough and having enough expertise and 
     resources to deal effectively with these real or imagined 
     problems. The federal government is seen as being able to 
     solve the deterioration of the historic architecture of the 
     downtown Main Street, even though federal post offices 
     somehow manage to be built in startling modernistic contrast 
     to colonial, Greek or Victorian downtowns. The federal 
     government will save the local culture. But the federal 
     government condemns and tears down towns with houses by the 
     hundreds for National Parks. But what are the biggest changes 
     in local culture in the last couple of centuries? To start--
     the automobile, the movement of the workplace from the home 
     to the job site elsewhere, now of both husband and wife. The 
     decline of rural churches, rural agriculture, the end of the 
     one-room school house, the decline of river trade in many 
     areas. And so on. What have these to do with federal 
     policies? About all the federal government can do is promote 
     local museums. If it tries to direct the evolution of the 
     culture by central planning, even less rural prosperity will 
     be the result. Remember-the big impact of these preservation 
     programs is on rural, not urban, America.
       But let use move aside from the issues of culture and 
     historic preservation, often used as arguments for the 
     American Heritage Rivers program, to the ones which are at 
     the heart of our concern: the need to control pollution, the 
     need to impose regional planning and the need to control the 
     growth of population, which is related to the perceived 
     planning need. These re the three key areas noted in the 
     official pronouncements nebulously describing the American 
     Heritage Rivers program, and I think that these will be the 
     areas where property rights will be threatened.


                    preservationist land designation

       My field of concern is private property rights. Private 
     property rights are fundamental to the exercise of all our 
     freedoms. One of my special areas of interests is land 
     designations. Land designations may be honorific, as the U.N. 
     Biosphere Reserves purport to be; pre-zoning, as in the 
     Northern Forest Lands program for New York, Vermont, New 
     Hampshire and Maine; or grandiose direct regional zoning as 
     is the federal Columbia River Gorge Commission, Lake Tahoe 
     Commission mention by Mr. Meese last night and New York 
     State's Adirondack Park Agency which includes 3 million acres 
     of private land, or as were the original plans for the Hudson 
     Valley Greenway.
       I got into the problem of these designations because of a 
     1990 New York study, for the future of the Adirondacks where 
     I unfortunately reside. I obtained the back-up, already- 
     written legislation, which, in conjunction with the 
     report, called for 2,000 acre per house zoning, removing 
     houses where they were visible from highways, which were 
     to become mere travel ``corridors,'' and the acquisition 
     of 2/3 million acres of additional government land from 
     private property owners. I discovered two other 
     overlapping designation programs at the same time--the 
     Northern Forest Lands program for federal zoning over 26 
     million acres of land, and the Champlain-Adirondack 
     Biosphere Reserve. South of us was the Hudson River 
     Greenway.
       We did a tremendous amount of research to ferret out the 
     significance of the Biosphere Reserve designation. Basically, 
     we discovered that the land areas were to be preserved, 
     though whatever government programs are available, by 
     dividing them into core, buffer and transition areas. Core 
     areas, which are to have no permanent human habitation, are 
     to be connected by corridors, also known in the international 
     environmental circles as ``land bridges.''
       In the preservationist's literature, much of it making most 
     peculiar reading, the prime land bridges are considered to be 
     the riverine corridors, the riparian strips, or, put simply, 
     the rivers and the land along them.
       Environmental thinking today is to preserve ecosystems 
     connected by corridors. The most extreme presentation of the 
     thinking is in the ``wild lands'' program, where the core 
     areas, sometimes trumpeted as ``ecosystems,'' are connected 
     by corridors and gradually the cores eat up the buffer areas, 
     the corridors become wider and wider and over the years only 
     isolated areas of inhabited space remain within a thick grid 
     of once small core areas and once narrow corridors. In the 
     end, according to the leading thinkers, 90 percent of the 
     area of the contiguous states is to become entirely wild, 
     with cities in these areas to become only hulking ruins as 
     reminders to the ugly days when civilization predominated. 
     These outlandish ideas are funded lucratively by the Pew 
     charitable trust, the Turner Foundation and others, and so 
     have actually gained ground, but although these ideas are 
     repeatedly in print, the environmentalists will lie through 
     their teeth and deny them when convenient.
       I oppose the American Heritage Rivers program for what it 
     does on its face and for what it obviously represents to the 
     environmentalists. The American Heritage Rivers program is 
     one of the top two or three most important programs to those 
     who support the protection of the environment through federal 
     controls. All of these organizations, from the National 
     Audubon Society to the National Trust for Historic 
     Preservation to the Wildlands Project oppose private property 
     rights.


                          Purported Practices

       When speaking publicly, advocates of the American Heritage 
     Rivers program present it as having two main purposes, easing 
     the way of localities in their dealings with 
     federal regulatory agencies and helping to make federal 
     grants available to localities.


                           history of program

       In my estimation, the American Heritage Rivers program is a 
     substitute for the failed generic American, or National, 
     Areas program which was the subject of a three-year pitched 
     battle in Congress. This battle started in the Democratic 
     Congress, was blocked by our friends, and then went into the 
     Republican Congress, where the national property rights 
     movement organized and the program was defeated. The 
     environmentalists wanted it so badly that, behind the scenes, 
     they offered to concede one of their hardest fought action 
     areas, grazing reform, to have the Heritage Areas bill pass, 
     but the property rights movement prevailed--in spite of

[[Page E2003]]

     an iffy Republican Congress. At the end of the 104th 
     Congress, an Omnibus National Parks bill passed with a number 
     of individual American or National Areas included, adding to 
     the former ones, and the total of Congressional designations 
     is now sixteen. This includes the Hudson in New York, where 
     even Congressman Jerry Solomon, who long blocked the program, 
     acquiesced, first under pressure from Gingrich to help a New 
     York Democrat Maurice Hinchey in order to get Dems on board, 
     and then in response to the local Republican machine's desire 
     for porkbarrel. This year there is another omnibus parks bill 
     gestating, and more American Heritage porkbarrel Areas may be 
     designated by Congress under Republican leadership.
       The President announced in his 1997 State of the Union that 
     he would designate ten American Heritage Rivers, which 
     surprised all of us--we are not insiders. The President's 
     Council on Environmental Quality presented a first 
     description of the program in the Federal Register in May 
     1997, and early in September 1997 the President issued his 
     executive order with further description. All of the material 
     is quite nebulous, but certain details and phraseology are 
     most revealing. There were also sworn testimonies by the 
     director of the President's Council on Environmental Quality, 
     Katie McGinty, at a July 1997 Congressional oversight hearing 
     and again at a September 1997 Congressional hearing on a bill 
     to stop funding, when a number of national leaders and 
     grassroots activists of the property rights movement spoke. I 
     have noticed that the sworn promises of compromises by Katie 
     McGinty are often meaningless and that the seeming 
     concessions to home-rule in the official publication are also 
     of no importance to the Council when an important designation 
     like that of the entire length of the Hudson River, submitted 
     by Governor Pataki, is under consideration. In that case the 
     promise of the need for community initiation and support was 
     circumvented and the designation actually kept secret as to 
     the areas to be included so that the touchier regions 
     wouldn't know enough to protest.
       I was invited to speak at the September 1997 Congressional 
     hearing. You are welcome to take copies of my presentation, 
     which was available on one of the information tables. The 
     hearing was on Representative Helen Chenoweth's important 
     bill H.R. 1832, to deny the use of any federal funds for the 
     American Heritage Rivers program. There is a national 
     drive to add to the current 52 sponsors in the House for 
     Representative Chenoweth's bill. Copies of the bill are on 
     the table. Please take a copy and do your best to bring 
     your Representative on board as a co-sponsor.
       The Mountain States Legal Foundation also has a lawsuit 
     constitutionally challenging the American Heritage Rivers 
     program--on Representative Chenoweth's behalf. By using an 
     executive order to establish the program, Clinton has usurped 
     the legislative power of Congress, which is a violation of 
     separation of powers. The case is before the D.C. Circuit 
     Court of Appeals.


            effective means to deny private property rights

       The American Heritage Rivers program brings grants, 
     computer monitoring and a juggernaut of federal agencies 
     together with the potential to effectively increase 
     government control over private property and thereby deny 
     private property rights.


                           Grants and zoning

       Using grants as the camel's nose under the tent or as the 
     direct incentive, state and federal government agencies will 
     effectuate the enactment of stricter local, regional or 
     state-levels zoning. Keep in mind that the preservationists 
     think that it is just as good if locals carry the gun for 
     state or federal level elite planning. Basically, this type 
     of zoning is directed to the gentrification of the 
     countryside, and trying to preserve a beautiful, largely 
     imagined remembrance of the countryside, with no smells, no 
     independently practiced home industry, such as the 
     blacksmiths of the past--the modern counterparts ranging from 
     machine shops to junk yards and gas stations, and no mines or 
     manufacturers as once flourished. They seek to enact a rural 
     landscape of bucolic agriculture and forest extending beyond 
     strictly bordered hamlets. One could spend the time of an 
     entire conference such as this Eagle Forum and begin to touch 
     on the ways that preservation zoning carried out on either a 
     state or local level has destroyed businesses, ruined 
     families and bankrupted innocent people, even sent them to 
     jail.
       Just last month I spent a weekend reviewing the pro se 
     (without a lawyer) petition to the U.S. Supreme Court of a 
     bankrupt Massachusetts dairy farmer. He had lost his $25 
     million farm and was living with his aged wife in small 
     rented quarters. He was desperately hoping to be heard by a 
     nation's highest court without the help of lawyers, for which 
     he had absolutely no more money, all because of zoning 
     enforced by a local preservationists group. We have many more 
     such heartbreaking examples
       A good example of how a voluntary federal land-use program 
     working in conjunction with grants brings in excessive local 
     zoning is the 1972 federal Coastal Zone Management Act. In 
     1996 the town of Coxsackie, New York, defeated, a so-called 
     Local Waterfront Rehabilitation Plan, or LWRP, which was 
     basically strict preservation-oriented zoning for the 
     entire township, extending several miles from the river. 
     This planning was promoted by the New York State 
     Department of State to implement the Coastal Zone 
     Management Act. Extremely capable, civic-minded people had 
     to work hard to stave off this basically federal program 
     disguised by the trappings of various state and regional 
     agencies. Grants also promote the full complement of 
     greenway as aspects, namely trails and land acquisition. 
     Land regulation will pressure people into selling out.


                          Computer Monitoring

       The program description promulgated by the Council on 
     Environmental Quality heralds the ability to instantaneously 
     update a publicly available, computerized ``state of the 
     river'' monitoring of individual river pollution, planning 
     and population. In my opinion, this federal computer 
     monitoring will be by geographic information systems, or GIS, 
     or digitalized data converted on a coordinate basis to 
     computer mapping of overlays of data. Four years ago I wrote 
     a report exposing the Adirondack Park Agency's GIS system of 
     about 30 databases from local assessment records to satellite 
     space imagery. The surveillance capacity is quite serious. 
     Just this year, it came out in the Wall Street Journal that 
     building departments in the U.S. are contracting with the 
     Russian space agency to obtain photos for enforcement 
     purposes. I think that this computer monitoring is also 
     geared to so-called citizen enforcement suits, for both 
     pollution and zoning enforcement. People's lives have been 
     destroyed by such suits. Logging in some national forests has 
     come to a near halt. This year, citizen suit activists have 
     begun bringing proceedings to stop all land activity in 
     entire watersheds because the rivers fed by these watersheds 
     are not up to federal standards.


                         Juggernaut of Agencies

       The federal agencies which are part of the American 
     Heritage Rivers program are the Departments of Agriculture 
     (which includes the National Forest Service), Defense (which 
     includes the Army Corps of Engineers), Justice, Interior 
     (which includes the National Park Service and the Fish and 
     Wildlife Service), Energy, Housing and Urban Development, 
     Commerce, Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, 
     National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for 
     the Arts, the Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation, 
     and the President's Council on Environmental Quality. The 
     Corps of Engineers is evolving into the lead agency, for some 
     reason. I have noticed that the Department of Defense is 
     heading and providing headquarters for a Pennsylvania 
     Heritage area program for logging heritage. These thirteen 
     agencies form the American Heritage Rivers Interagency 
     Committee. I think that these agencies, especially the U.S. 
     Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the 
     EPA, and the Corps of Engineers, will become a juggernaut of 
     enforcement of federal regulations and that, with their state 
     contacts, will even enable state environmental enforcement to 
     be more effective and harsh.


                         The 1998 Designations

       On July 30, following the recommendations of an advisory 
     council of typical participants such as the key environmental 
     groups and political figures from particular heritage areas, 
     President Clinton made the first ten designations at West 
     Jefferson in Ashe County on the New River in Virginia, near 
     the borders of West Virginia and Kentucky. It was widely 
     noted that President Clinton chose that location because he 
     could simultaneously stump in Raleigh for Democrat John 
     Edwards who is running against one of, Clinton's most 
     outspoken opponents, North Carolina Senator Lauch Faircloth.
       The first ten rivers are the Hudson, the Mississippi from 
     St. Louis north, the Connecticut, Rio Grande in Texas, 
     Potomac, New River in three States, Detroit River in 
     Michigan, Hanalei in Hawaii, St. John's in Florida, and the 
     Willamette in Oregon. Movement has already started toward 
     adding the rest of the Mississippi, the Susquehanna and 
     Lackawanna watershed and certain rivers in Massachusetts.
       The Hudson, Connecticut and northern Mississippi Rivers 
     could potentially make up so much area that it's hard to 
     imagine that selection of grants would be narrowed. It is 
     impossible to know how much area on each side of a river will 
     be included. When I led a contingent of national grassroots 
     property rights leaders to interview Katie McGinty in June 
     1997, and we asked her this question, she made the odd 
     statement that a watershed varies in its definition. Since a 
     watershed is a scientific term defining geography, this was 
     surprising. But her non-answer did reveal that the 
     designation could be wider than the usual county width for 
     Heritage areas.
       I have spent about nine years exposing such designations, 
     including those involving the UN. This one has the noxious 
     characteristics typical of the thinking of the 
     internationalist crowd who not only think of local government 
     as their tool but also think that way of state and the U.S. 
     government.
       These are practical matters affecting people today, 
     however. To return to my New York State example, nobody is 
     going back to Congress to ask to repeal the 1972 Coastal Zone 
     Management Act because in 1998 a little town of Coxsackie in 
     New York is worried about the LWRP zoning for the entire 
     town. Five, ten or twenty years from now the layers of 
     bureaucracy implementing facets of the American Heritage 
     Rivers program will become unfathomable. Law enforcement is 
     confusing enough today. Federal, State, and

[[Page E2004]]

     local law overlap to regulate wetlands, for instance.
       During the founding period of this nation, the founders did 
     not want amorphous layers of government whose responsibility 
     for particular impacts was disguised or unclear. They decided 
     that the federal government should rule directly where 
     federal powers applied, rather than coerce the states to pass 
     laws. Today, people have trouble knowing the source of 
     rules regulating their lives. I can describe how federal 
     flood insurance law is carried down through the federal 
     government to the state to the local enforcer, but can one 
     of 100 citizens do this?
       The courts have not held that federal incentives to pass 
     state or local laws are unconstitutional, but I believe that 
     these incentives result in a wrongful blurring of 
     responsibility. I think that the same lines of reasoning that 
     argue against the federal government compelling states to 
     regulate apply to the federal government offering or 
     withholding financial aid to persuade States to regulate.
       In 1992 when New York blocked the United States government 
     from forcing the State to adopt its own nuclear waste, the 
     U.S. Supreme Court said, ``* * * where a Federal Government 
     compel states to regulate, the accountability of both state 
     and federal officials is diminished.''
       People who have the frustration of dealing with this 
     shuffling of responsibility when federal incentive programs 
     are carried out at the local level do indeed currently 
     experience lack of accountability.


                                Summary

       In opposing the American Heritage Rivers program, we have 
     to fight on the basis of an undefined program. We can argue 
     against the American Heritage Rivers program
       (1) on the basis that the reasons offered for the program--
     grants and alleviation of regulatory problems--are not a 
     logical explanation for it;
       (2) on the basis of experience with other pre-zoning 
     programs and seeing how pre-zoning designations pan out;
       (3) on the basis of who the program's advocates are and 
     what they have been broadly seeking;
       (4) on the basis of the involved agencies and how they have 
     already negatively affected private property rights and local 
     representative government and;
       (5) and on the basis of the description of the program.
       There is no American Heritage Rivers program description 
     which says in the regulatory language normally promulgated 
     that party A writes the grant terms, party B finds the grants 
     for interested entities, and party C sets the terms for 
     modifying local laws and effectuating certain programs in 
     order to get the grants or the regulatory relief.
       On another note, there is certainly no party D who holds 
     hearings and lays out the economic implications of the 
     specifics of the program under the requirements of the 
     National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA.
       Published descriptions of the program do not spell out how 
     the environmental preservation groups plan to utilize the 
     computerized state of the river information.
       There is nothing in writing that spells out how agencies 
     will be more effective. It is supposedly just better internal 
     management. And other agencies say that GIS is supposedly 
     non-threatening.
       In opposing the program, as we did in opposing the 
     Congressional program, we argue most simply that the American 
     Heritage Rivers program is a very large scale attempt to 
     impose national zoning. It is a part of a long pattern of 
     unsuccessful and successful steps to impose federal control 
     of land-use. The 1970's Jackson-Udall Congressional effort at 
     national zoning was defeated, but many subsequent programs 
     with great effectiveness at such federal control of land-use 
     are in place--wetlands and endangered species protection 
     being the most far-reaching.

     

                          ____________________