Agricultural News
NACD Concerned with User Fees In Budget Agreement
Wed, 11 Dec 2013 16:23:31 CST
The National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD) is pleased that the Ryan-Murray budget agreement avoids a government shutdown and replaces sequestration for the next two years with some additional non-defense discretionary funding. However, we are extremely concerned about the unprecedented imposition of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) technical assistance user fees.
"Imposing conservation planning technical assistance user fees is short-sighted, creating a burden on producers who are simply trying to be proactive and do the right thing for the land and water resources," said NACD President Earl Garber. "User fees will discourage producers from implementing critical conservation practices at a time when they have the heavy burden of meeting the demand of a growing population. This will ultimately take a toll on our nation's natural resource base, when as we know, the cost of repair is always greater that the cost of proactive maintenance in the first place."
NACD cannot support user fees if they are not going toward the technical assistance that is necessary to do conservation planning.
"Conservation planning is critical to help producers and landowners with compliance, environmental regulations, voluntary stewardship, and maintaining economically viable businesses," said Garber. "As this Budget Resolution reads, there is no guarantee that receipts collected from user fees would be allocated for future conservation planning and implementation."
We recognize that waivers are included in the resolution; however, even the process of seeking a waiver creates an administrative burden for an agency already managing a large workload. At the end of the day, the administrative burden of collecting these fees would potentially outweigh the dollars that would be saved.
"We urge the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to prioritize conservation as they make allocations for the Agriculture Subcommittees," Garber continued. "Specifically, we're calling for an increase in Conservation Operations funding to help offset the budget cuts to conservation in relation to NRCS user fees for proactive conservation planning."
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