Senate makes no change to Idaho wolf budget
Associated Press
BOISE, Idaho – A Senate panel has approved an Interior Department spending bill that does not increase money for Idaho’s program to manage and monitor growing numbers of wolves, but boosts federal spending on sage grouse habitat and noxious-weed control in the state.
The $26.3 billion appropriations bill for the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency in the next fiscal year includes more than $11 million for Idaho projects requested by Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It includes $3 million for wildlife conservation in the Upper Snake River Valley, $2 million for forest conservation in the St. Joe River Basin and $1 million to purchase mining claims within the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.
After Thursday’s vote, the bill now heads to the full Senate. If approved, it will be reconciled with a House version that passed that chamber May 19.
The Senate committee’s spending bill boosts Idaho’s program to improve sage grouse habitat from $300,00 this year to $500,000 next year, part of an effort to increase populations of the bird in southern Idaho to prevent its listing under the Endangered Species Act. The bill also doubles from $500,000 to $1 million the budget of a grant program that encourages land owners to eradicate noxious weeds.
But Idaho’s high-profile effort to put management of the federal Northern Rockies wolf-recovery program in the hands of state and tribal officials will receive the same amount of federal money next year – $1.135 million – as it did this year.
Although senators raised the state wolf-recovery budget to $1.5 million for the next year, the $36,500 increase will go to a similar state management project in Montana.
“We’re grateful for every dime we get, but we’ve got more wolves than we know what to do with now,” said Jim Caswell, administrator of the Idaho Office of Species Conservation, which oversees the state wolf management plan.
The 2006 Interior spending bill produced by the committee was $530 million less than last year’s, which Craig said is a reflection of attempts by congressional budget writers to hold the line on spending.
“Current budget deficits plus our increased needs for homeland security and the war on terror meant the rest of the government has to tighten its belt,” he said in a statement.
Caswell said Idaho uses the wolf-recovery money from the Interior Department in concert with Nez Perce Tribe and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managers to track expanding wolf populations in the state and to pay ranchers’ claims for losses of livestock to wolves.
In 1995 and 1996, the Interior Department released transplanted Canadian wolves into the mountains of central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park as part of a program to re-establish populations of a natural predator that was systematically exterminated by humans at the turn of the century.
The wolves are now exceeding recovery goals in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, with officials estimating there are more than 800 wolves in the three states, including Yellowstone.
Idaho officials say the state’s wolf population is at least 420 wolves in 43 known packs and growing. Documented livestock deaths by wolves since their reintroduction to Idaho include 19 cows and 173 sheep.