FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 30, 2019

HELENA — Montana Conservation Voters Education Fund is releasing a new series of digital ads calling on U.S. Senator Steve Daines to fulfill his own commitment to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) at $900 million.

The new digital ads will soon run on Montana newspaper websites, urging Montanans to contact Daines to support full, dedicated funding for the nation’s most successful conservation and public lands initiative.

On April 9 Daines said, “I will not stop fighting until we get full funding of LWCF,” which is $900 million. But on May 16, Daines asked his colleagues on the Senate Appropriations Committee for only $600 million in LWCF funding.

“Since when is only two-thirds of funding for our public lands good enough?” said Whitney Tawney, Program Director for Montana Conservation Voters Education Fund. “Montanans aren’t willing to settle for less than $900 million for LWCF and Senator Daines shouldn’t be either. We demand to know why he moved the goalpost on us.”

First established by Congress in 1965, LWCF has been funded by offshore oil and gas royalties, not taxpayer dollars, providing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to protect public lands and increase access to outdoor recreation. LWCF has invested nearly $600 million in the Big Sky State. The fund supports Montana’s outdoor recreation economy, which sustains 71,000 Montana jobs and generates more than $7 billion in economic activity in Montana every year.

The new digital ads follow a billboard in Belgrade and an online petition carrying the same message. Daines is a member of the majority party in the United States Senate and has voted twice to support the nomination of David Bernhardt as Secretary of the Interior, despite Bernhardt’s attempt to slash funding for LWCF in the President’s Fiscal Year 2020 budget.

CONTACT
Whitney Tawney
Montana Conservation Voters Education Fund
Email: whitney@mtvoters.org
Phone: (406) 254-1593

Montana Conservation Voters Education Fund (MCVEF) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization whose mission is to educate citizens and organizations in the basic techniques of effective civic engagement to further environmental and conservation goals. MCVEF programs educate the public about critical environmental and public lands issues; promote greater non-partisan citizen involvement in the democratic process; and provide strategic tools to conservation organizations to be more effective.