Sen. Ensign vows to fight for Tahoe

President Clinton's administration tried to get at some of the millions generated from the sale of federal land in Southern Nevada. Now the Bush Administration is eyeing it.

In a conference call for reporters on Thursday, Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said he kept Clinton away from the money and promised to use "every power he can" to keep revenue produced by the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act of 1998, which he co-authored, flowing only to programs for Nevada.

"So much money is being raised, we knew people would be trying to get their greedy hands on it," Ensign said. "It will be a battle for us to keep it from the administration."

More than $300 million from the act has been promised for environmental restoration programs at Tahoe. The rest of the money has gone for general education, water infrastructure, construction of parks and trails, and to conserve sensitive land.

President Bush's budget, to be released Monday, asks for 70 percent of the revenue from the program to help cover the growing federal deficit. Since its inception, the sale of federal land in Clark County outside of Las Vegas has generated $1.6 billion.

"I will be working aggressively to kill any effort to take money out because that just has been an awesome program for our state," Ensign said. "It was Nevada first of all that made the land worth anything in the first place, and the original intent of the bill was to keep the money in the state of Nevada."

Ensign said the fact that he serves on the federal Budget Committee and that Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., also an advocate for restoring the environment at Lake Tahoe, is on the Appropriations Committee, will help the effort to keep the money in Nevada.

"It's in the budget, but they still would have to change the law itself," Ensign said. "We would want to kill the actual initiative. They would need 60 votes to pass something like that. The fear is that it would be attached to an appropriations bill."

Even if the funding earmarked for Lake Tahoe through the lands management act is preserved, the Lake Tahoe Basin faces another danger, Ensign said.

Progress made from millions of dollars worth of environmental restoration projects would be negated if a catastrophic wildfire burns next to the lake, and ash and other nutrients are washed in, he said.

The senator said he knows about the wildfire prevention planning work that has been done for the entire basin in the last year, and that he, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Reno, and Rep. John Doolittle, R-Rocklin, are working "different angles ... to try to come up with a plan to bring forest health back to the way it once was, so if there is a fire it won't be catastrophic."

But what about the $760 million Bush included in his 2005 budget to reduce wildfire danger around communities through something called the Healthy Forest Restoration Act? Is Tahoe going to get any of that money?

"There is nothing I can talk about today, but we are working on it," Ensign said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday announced Bush's recommended budget for 2006 includes $867 million for forest projects across the nation.

"It is encouraging that even though the budget is kind of tight, the president is proposing to Congress to get more money for healthy forests in 2006," said Matt Mathes, spokesman for the Pacific Southwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service.

n Gregory Crofton can be reached at (530) 542-8045 or by e-mail at gcrofton@tahoedailytribune.com.