Congress created the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution in 1998 as an add-on to the Udall Foundation, which it created six years earlier. Never heard of them? A lot of senators and representatives haven’t either. Let’s shine some light there.
If Congress defunded both of these obscure bureaucracies, it would save taxpayers $10 million a year — $3 million for the foundation, $7 million for the institute. Both are superfluous, nonessential boondoggles.
The Udall Foundation honors the lives of two Arizona Democrats — Morris “Mo” Udall (15-term congressman and one of the Left’s sentimental-favorite presidential aspirants) and his brother Stewart (a three-term congressman, secretary of the interior).
The Foundation offers scholarships, internships, park tours, and Native American programs — functions that other government entities have also long provided.
The Senate’s Udall cousins — Mo’s son Mark, D-Colo., and Stewart’s son Tom, D-N.M., — also get taxpayer-funded advertisement just from the foundation’s name.
But the Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution has to be one of government’s most quixotic, unrealistic traps for the wishful ever invented.
The ECR is like “Let’s Make a Deal” for deer and headlights. It’s a federal agency that arranges for communities with disputes against federal agencies to hire mediators who lead wary adversaries to trust each other (and trust the federal agencies), and when it’s over, everybody staggers home happily unaware of being run over by the federal agencies. The process is thrilling, the outcome stinks.
Illustration: ECR’s fiasco with a years-long “collaborative process” for removing an old two-lane lift bridge and building a modern four-lane bridge across the St. Croix River from Stillwater, Minn., to Houlton, Wis.
The Federal Highway Administration and both states’ transportation departments agreed to do that in 1995, but a green group’s lawsuit nixed it. The Lower St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, site of the old lift bridge that creates incredible traffic jams, is part of the Wild and Scenic River System, a Big Green grab-bag lobbied into law by the Sierra Club in 1968.
So, in 2002, ECR found mediators (that anybody could have hired) and convened a group of 27 agency and non-agency stakeholders, which began hopeful talks. First, preservationists said they couldn’t tear down the old lift bridge — it was historic and should be a bicycle and pedestrian crossing. Then came collaborations to designate Stillwater a “historic district” and impose “growth management.” Then the Park Service decided to allow only a two-lane bridge.
Next came fatal flaw No. 1 in ECR’s warm, fuzzy, gee-whiz approach: The Sierra Club filed suit to stop everything. ECR’s fatal flaw No. 2: Stakeholders loved the victory of collaboration over old mistrusts, but nobody saw the agency headlights coming. In 2010, the National Park Service reversed itself, saying the bridge would be illegal.
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., worked to reverse the Park Service — and a citizen coalition materialized in support. Bachmann, Wisconsin Democrat Rep. Ron Kind, and others introduced a bill early this month to make the bridge legal under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
Last week, Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton joined political opposite Bachmann at a press conference in Stillwater to support the proposed $690 million bridge. It stunned everyone, especially Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minneapolis-area greenie who pledged to do “everything in my power” to stop the bridge.
Final spotlight: The ECR receives about $750,000 a year in client fees. Documents obtained by The Washington Examiner also show that the Hewlett Foundation donated $400,000.
Connect the dots: Stop congressional funding, boost ECR fees, and solicit wealthy foundations like Hewlett to fill the gap for ECR and the Udall Foundation. To foundation folks, $10 million a year is a rounding error.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
