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SUNDAY FOCUS: CONSERVATION FUND THREATENED Congress threatens conservation fund that has left a big mark in Jackson County Land and Water Conservation Fund built many parks, including Greenway Comment By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune Posted Sep. 20, 2015 at 12:01 AM By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune Posted Sep. 20, 2015 at 12:01 AM How the LWCF works --> The Land and Water Conservation Fund takes a portion of offshore gas and oil royalty payments made by energy companies to the federal government to create, improve and protect parks and open space ... » Read more X How the LWCF works The Land and Water Conservation Fund takes a portion of offshore gas and oil royalty payments made by energy companies to the federal government to create, improve and protect parks and open space on every level, from federal projects to small towns. One portion of the fund goes to the Federal Land Protection Program, where the money has helped create and expand national parks and as recently as last year bought 900 acres of private industrial timberland for inclusion in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southeastern Jackson County. On the local and state levels, the fund's State Assistance Program metes out grants for everything from state park acquisitions to funding of restrooms and benches in city parks. Since its inception in 1965, this particular portion of the LWCF has issued more than $3 billion in grants, but its annual payments have dwindled to about $40 million nationwide in recent years, according to the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition. Each state gets its annual allocation of money available for LWCF grants, with 60 percent of it targeted for local and municipal entities and the remaining 40 percent toward a handful of state agencies, such as parks, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Oregon Department of Forestry. For instance,Oregon's portion for the 2014 fiscal year was $657,659, upping its total amount to $55.8 million since the program issued its first grant in 1965, according to the National Park Service, which oversees the program. Grants are broken down into three categories — acquisition, development and rehabilitation. To qualify, the grants must be matched dollar-for-dollar with cash, the value of land donated for a specific park and in-kind donations ranging from fencing materials and pathway paving to work done by city or county staff members undertaking park improvement designs. If a qualified grant request falls short of the target allocation, the money is returned to the fund. For a county or city to accept the grant, it must keep the park or open space accessible to the public, a requirement that remains in perpetuity. In Oregon, the perpetuity policing falls to Michele Scalise, who every five years has to ensure that the lands associated with about 1,400 LWCF grants are still in public use and acceptable — including projects as simple as Eagle Point's Brown Park, where a $750 LWCF grant in 1972 created a bathroom there. "It doesn't matter if the bathroom is still there or not," Scalise says. "That property needs to be there and open to the public. "If I see, say, a convenience store on that property, that's where we get into problems," Scalise says. Cities or counties, however, can swap or sell LWCF-purchased land, but they must mitigate for that loss by providing new park or open space land that is at least as valuable and has at least the public benefit as the original land. Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or [email protected] . Follow him at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman . » Social News When community members envisioned a multifaceted sports park along the Rogue River at Gold Hill in the late 1970s, Jackson County Parks Manager Neil Ledward immediately realized he needed gas money to get the project moving and he knew just where to get it. Ledward first secured a small boat-ramp grant from the Oregon State Marine Board, snaked some bike-path money from the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department and offered to do the park design in-house. He bundled the grants and in-kind services until the pot was sweet enough to leverage the gas cash. He already was on a first-name basis with the Seattle regional staff of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the federal program that took a sliver of federal offshore oil and gas royalties to build parks and protect open spaces, and he knew how to ensure that the Gold Hill park proposal fit the bill. His 1978 grant proposal netted $91,125 in LWCF cash that made the park a reality, and it is now one of 75 parks or open spaces either bought, built or improved in Jackson County since the fund began in 1965. "That was like a five- or six-grant program," says Ledward, 88, of Talent. "It was quite a bit of fun. "You had to know how to work it and you had to know the people doing it. Whenever I got something going, I'd give those guys a call." The LWCF turned 50 years old this year, but the program that pumped the equivalent of more than $8.54 million in today's dollars into projects here during that run might not see age 51. The fund is set to expire Sept. 30, and Congress has yet to renew it. U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, a Hood River Republican, is one of several members of Congress to have voiced concerns about what they see as the federal government’s inability to manage the vast amounts of land it already owns. That’s why there needs to be reforms to a program like the Land and Water Conservation Fund to better ensure that impacts on local communities, such as a reduced tax base, are taken into account, Walden spokesman Andrew Malcolm says. "The House Natural Resources Committee is considering a number of these ideas, and Greg looks forward to reviewing them," Malcolm says. National outdoor and sportsmen's groups such as Trout Unlimited, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership are supporting a bipartisan bill that would reauthorize the fund mostly intact. TRCP President Whit Fosburgh says he believes reauthorization will occur, but it's been held up in part by a stalemated Congress, along with the swirling sentiment that the government already owns and controls more of America than it should. "That kind of rhetoric plays in a Congress where government is perceived as a bad thing," Fosburgh says. "But this has been a hugely successful program in the federal government and we don't want to see it go away." While the political rub may lie within the federal lands debate, the lack of program authorization also threatens LWCF's State Assistance Program, which has left its fingerprints on park development and open-space protection throughout Jackson County. A Mail Tribune review of 50 years of LWCF grants shows that the state portion of the fund has sent more than $3.74 million to Jackson County, where governmental agencies matched that cash with money, land donations or in-kind donations that acquired, developed, maintained or enhanced most of Jackson County's public parks and open spaces. The grants have ranged in size and scope from $750 to build a bathroom at Brown Park in Eagle Point in 1972 to a series of grants totaling almost $144,000 to the city of Medford that built parks adjacent to Medford elementary schools during the 1970s and '80s. East Medford's Bear Creek Park benefited from just shy of $330,000 in LWCF grants for expansion of park lands and development of its playgrounds, tennis courts and picnic areas, records show. The city of Ashland dipped into LWCF money eight different times for Lithia Park development, including the State Assistance Program's 96th grant nationwide in 1967. Of the 75 grants issued in Jackson County through the LWCF's State Assistance Program, only eight went toward land acquisition, while the rest went to development or restoration, fund records show. Jackson County, primarily under Ledward, has landed nine separate grants totaling almost $382,000 for its parks development that began with a $19,110 grant in 1967 — the 21st grant proposal in the fund's history — to build a septic system that serves the county parks and campgrounds at Willow Lake. Its development zenith came in 1978 when a $128,314 grant helped create the drag strip at the Jackson County Sports Park in White City. National Park Service officials, using Oregon State University data, conclude that grant in '78 is equivalent to $466,598 in today's dollars, says April Slayton, the service's chief of public affairs. "It's clear the program had a huge influence on what we manage today," says John Vial, the county's roads and parks director. "We would never even try to develop most of the parks had we had to do it today." But the pièce de résistance locally is the Bear Creek Greenway, the running-walking-cycling path that stretches for 20 miles from Ashland to beyond Central Point and connects a string of small parks along the way. "The Bear Creek Greenway would not have been completed without the assistance of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, bottom line," says Karen Smith, the Greenway's former coordinator. The Greenway first germinated in 1964 as something called the "Bear Creek Park Chain," with a series of city parks along Bear Creek connected with a paved pathway, Ledward says. The county had received some land donations toward it as well as some public lands, but they were pockmarked along the dreamed-of route and Ledward needed cash to buy land in between from willing sellers. By the early 1970s, the idea had morphed into the Greenway, but it didn't qualify for LWCF grants because those grants required the 50-percent match for each property purchase, Ledward says. So Ledward had the entire Greenway labeled a "linear park," holes and all, he says. That allowed the land donations to qualify as matching funds toward LWCF money tapped to purchase parcels that connected the dots. "You kind of needed to know how to work the system," Ledward says. The system came through, first with a nearly $469,000 grant in 1971, and eventually totaled just under $900,000 in LWCF grants that went entirely toward Greenway land acquisition. "We didn't need to build everything right away, just secure the land," Ledward says. "And we did." Those Greenway grants from 1971 to 1980 would equal nearly $3.5 million in today's dollars, according to the park service. But the LWCF well has run dry in Jackson County for more than a decade, with a 2004 grant of $25,848 for rehab of courts at Talent's Chuck Roberts Park the last LWCF grant of any form here, records show. That's a reality reflected across Oregon, says Michele Scalise, who manages LWCF projects in Oregon for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. In its heyday, the fund was one of the only sources for matching funds toward community projects, so it was popular despite its 50-50 match and requirements such as keeping the lands open to the public in perpetuity, Scalise says. But that changed in 1999 with the Oregon Lottery's local government grants program, whose roughly $5 million annual pot now is more than 10 times the maximum LWCF money available annually in Oregon. The lottery grants have fewer requirements and some can require as little as an 80-20 lottery-to-local funding match to qualify, Scalise says. "It's looking more and more attractive to apply to the more robust program," Scalise says. Public chatter about the LWCF rarely pops up locally unless the perpetuity clause alters development, sale or use of parkland bought or developed with fund money, such as the proposed but dropped Givan Park land swap along the Rogue River in 2011. The walkers, joggers and cyclists who travel the Greenway probably never consider they wouldn't have their outdoor opportunities without the sliver of gas money from offshore drilling decades ago. "It was a wonderful point in time," Smith says. "We were in the right time and at the right place. It couldn't have happened earlier and it couldn't have happened today. The resources just aren't there." Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or [email protected] . Follow him at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman . Top LWCF Grants in Jackson County by Mail Tribune By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune Posted Sep. 20, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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