For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
April 22, 2004
Press Gaggle by Scott McClellan and Jim Connaughton, CEQ Chairman
Aboard Air Force One
En Route Wells, Maine
10:32 A.M. EDT
MR. McCLELLAN: The President had his usual briefings before we
departed. The Freedom Corps greeter upon arrival -- we'll have two --
Frank and Carol Heller. They are volunteers with the nature reserve
that the President is going to. And the reserve works to increase the
understanding of ecology by investigating coastal environments, and
through community partnerships, the reserve promotes wide stewardship
of vital resources throughout the Gulf of Maine. And they volunteered
with these efforts.
Then the President looks forward to participating in a coastal
conservation project and delivering remarks to talk about our wetlands
policy initiative that you all have in the factsheet, that I'm going to
let Jim Connaughton talk about here in a minute.
He's going to be participating in a salt marsh water testing
project with volunteers. And let me tell you a little bit more about
the reserve. It's part of the larger national reserve system, and it's
a network of 26 areas across the United States that are protected for
long-term research, water quality monitoring, education and coastal
stewardship. It is established by the Coastal Zone Management Act of
'72, as amended, and the reserve system in a partnership program
between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- or NOAA
-- and the coastal states. NOAA provides funding, national guidance
and technical assistance for it.
And I would just point out that this is -- that Earth Day is being
celebrated during National Volunteer Week, where thousands of
volunteers are participating in local community service projects around
the nation, including efforts to help preserve and protect our public
lands, coastal areas, and open spaces.
And then, following that, when we return to the White House, the
President will make remarks at the President's Environmental Youth
Awards ceremony. And this has been something that the Environmental
Protection Agency has sponsored since 1971. The program recognizes
young people across America for projects that demonstrate their
commitment to the environment. And we can get you more background
information on that. It's students in grades k through 12 in all 50
states, and territories, that participate in this.
And with that, I want to just turn it over to Jim Connaughton, the
Chairman of our Council on Environmental Quality, to talk to you about
the new initiative that the President is announcing today on the
wetlands policy.
MR. CONNAUGHTON: Great. Thank you, Scott.
Today's event, you're going to see that the power of incentives,
partnership and personal stewardship, and really the great strength of
the President's Freedom Corps call to service in the name of
conservation -- in order to give that its fullest effects, the
President is announcing a major, new shift in policy when it comes to
the protection, improvement and restoration of the nation's wetlands.
Until today, the policy of the federal government had been to work
toward no net loss of wetlands. Until today, annually, the United
States of America would lose wetlands. We'd lose more than we gained.
But based on a new USDA report, Department of Agriculture report, we
have learned that, for the first time in history, in our nation's
history, we are seeing a gain in wetlands on agricultural lands. We
are also closing the gap in the loss in wetlands outside of
agriculture.
With that milestone, the President is committing the nation to go
from a policy of no net loss to a policy of increasing the overall
wetlands and quality of our wetlands in the nation. He will also
outline our strategy to ensure that this occurs. Through expanded
partnership and grant programs, we are going to restore one million
acres of wetlands -- that means taking areas that currently aren't
wetlands, or aren't serving as wetlands anymore, and reconverting them
back into wetlands. We're going to improve an additional one million
acres of wetlands. These are degraded areas that are not providing all
the habitat functions necessary to make for good and robust habitat,
and provide good cover and protection and food sources for wildlife.
Equally important to restoring wetlands and improving wetlands is
protecting against loss of wetlands that are at risk. And so we are
going to put in place a strategy to protect an additional one million
acres of wetlands through these expanded programs.
The President's overall conservation budget for 2005, which he's
asking the Congress to pass, is 53 percent greater than the budgets for
these programs we started with in 2001. The wetlands components of
these programs are 50 percent greater than the amount of dollars the
federal taxpayers were spending in 2001. And these substantial
increases in these programs will leverage private sector dollars,
foundation dollars, and dollars coming from conservation and
sportsmen's groups like Ducks, Unlimited, like the Nature Conservancy,
like the Trust for Public Land, as well as resources from other local
community groups and even, as you'll see here today, corporate groups
-- through groups such as the Corporate Wetlands Restoration
Partnership. It's the combination of these funding sources and these
commitments of government officials and private citizens that will
enable us to meet the goal.
Q You talked about no net loss -- or actually, an increase in
agricultural wetlands. What percentage of overall wetlands is
agricultural; what percentage is non-agricultural?
MR. CONNAUGHTON: The total acres of wetlands in the lower 48
states is about 110 million acres. In the Ag report -- we'll get this
to you -- it will give you the specific breakout as to how much of that
is found on agricultural land. I don't have that off the top of my
head.
Q Fifty, twenty?
MR. McCLELLAN: -- in the report today, though.
MR. CONNAUGHTON: We'll get it to you quickly.
Q But aren't there a lot more wetlands that are not
agricultural, compared to --
MR. CONNAUGHTON: Wetlands are primarily found on agricultural land
and on public land -- federal, state public lands. They are more
limited on private, non-agricultural lands. So the vast majority of
them, as I mentioned, had publicly managed lands.
Q What do you attribute the gain to?
MR. CONNAUGHTON: A massive amount of work over the last 30 --
actually, this is, what do you attribute getting to no net loss. It's
a massive amount of work over the last 30 years, building these
incentive and partnership programs. The federal government alone now
implements 30 programs to restore and protect wetlands. Those are
supported by programs at the state level and then these private
efforts.
We've gone -- 30 years ago we were losing annually -- losing on the
net, 500 acres of wetlands. As of the most recent broad inventory, in
1997, that was down to losing about 50,000 acres of wetlands a year.
The Ag report shows us that on agricultural lands, we are seeing a
gain for the first time, so these programs have done their part to get
us to this longstanding no net loss objective, which is why we can now
move with confidence to gaining wetlands, which will be -- it's great
for wildlife, it's great for people who enjoy and love these beautiful
areas, and it's great for the people who love to fish and bird-watch
and otherwise get out and about in wetlands areas.
Q -- the administration has thought about a rule that would
have allowed a lot of wetlands to be eliminated. So what changed his
mind? What changed Bush's mind on his approach to wetlands?
MR. CONNAUGHTON: Well, the assumption of your question is not
correct. The administration was not considering a rule that would
eliminate wetlands. What we did do is we are working on a rule to
implement a Supreme Court decision that took a certain portion of what
are called isolated wetlands out of federal regulatory jurisdiction.
Okay? Now, I want to make sure you understand the distinction.
There's regulations in place to prevent the loss of wetlands when
somebody does a development project. Not -- it's not an agricultural
issue, it's private development. Wait, it's private development.
What the Supreme Court said is, the federal government can't
regulate that activity if it's solely inside of a state. However,
there are substantial incentive and partnership programs that we can
use to address that gap. And, in fact, we're also announcing today
that EPA is committing $5 million additional to work with the states to
address that gap that the Supreme Court left for us.
The President made clear in December that with respect to the
regulatory program, we will assure no net loss of wetlands. And, in
fact, that will continue as we go forward on the regulatory program.
Now, it's also important that you have a sense of scale. You have
a 100 million acres of wetlands. These programs are going to tackle
three million acres worth of restoration and improvement and
protection. The regulatory program in any given year deals with about
20,000 or 30,000 acres of wetlands, and the way the program works is,
if you have to fill a wetland to create an area for a new hospital, for
example, you have to make up for it. You have to replace the wetland
that you're filling in. That's what the regulatory program does. That
program stays intact; it's strong; it works really well.
Q So will Leavitt now begin to enforce after the SWANCC
decision? Will Leavitt now begin to clean water enforcement of those
areas? Because for a while, it was suspended, clean water enforcement
of those waters. Is he now going -- and after the decision, the SWANCC
decision, which they announced in January that they were not going to
change the policy towards those waters, are they now going to enforce
there?
MR. CONNAUGHTON: You actually have your facts completely
backwards. Since SWANCC, we have -- and I'll give you all the details
-- we have aggressively enforced every wetlands regulatory case. We
have won all but one or two of those cases, defending regulatory
jurisdiction over wetlands.
Q There's no monitoring of those waters right now.
MR. CONNAUGHTON: Wait a second. In addition, three of the cases
that we've won through the court of appeals were just put up for cert*
by the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court denied review of those
cases. So we are winning the cases in the wetlands regulatory
setting. So what you said is exactly the opposite of what's been going
on.
Q What my question was, though, initially the administration
was thinking about imposing a new rule that would have redefined
isolated waterways, right? Isolated wetlands --
MR. CONNAUGHTON: That is incorrect. We did --
Q -- decided not to do that.
MR. CONNAUGHTON: No, no, you are incorrect. We issued what was
called an advance notice, not a proposed rule-making, seeking advice
from the public for what we should do to implement the Supreme Court
decision. The Supreme Court decision took away one of the bases by
which we had jurisdiction. It left significant uncertainty with
respect to a small number of cases, and we were seeking advice from the
public on how we should deal with that uncertainty. Based on that
advice that we got from the public, we decided that there was not a
need to move forward with the rule-making, okay, because it appeared to
us then and it appears to us now that the cases appear to be working
themselves out just fine.
Now, there's -- there will always be an outlier or two where
there's some ambiguity and we have to work those out on a case-by-case
basis, and that's what we're doing. But I want to underline, to the
extent we do not have regulatory authority, we are aggressively using
our incentive and our partnership based authority to provide protection
for wetlands at risk.
Q I mean, is there monitoring going on for those Swank lands
that are in question? The monitoring was suspended, right?
MR. CONNAUGHTON: Monitoring has never been suspended. There has
been a legitimate concern that the follow-up on mitigation actions --
that's where, again, if you fill a wetland to build a hospital and you
need to replace it with a new one, did the replacement work? We -- and
you'll see in the factsheet and you'll see in the background
information on the web today -- we are implementing a mitigation action
plan -- and this is the Bush administration implementing it, we
announced it last year -- that's going to give us better monitoring,
better measurement, and actually, get better protocol to ensure the
wetlands mitigation does the job it was intended to do.
Secondly, we have a -- we've built in a safety buffer in both the
EPA and Army Corps of Engineers programs and the highway programs. So,
for example, the law requires you to replace a wetland, one for one.
If you have to fill a wetland, you have to replace it with an equal
wetland. The Army Corps of Engineers, for a safety buffer, is
replacing at the rate of 1.8 acres for every acre lost. The Department
of Transportation has a policy that mandates that you replace 1.5 acres
for every acre lost. In practice, they're achieving close to 2.6 acres
for every acre lost. That gives us the assurance we need to address
that very real concern that some of this work -- we're still learning,
and some of this work might not prove out. And so we want to ensure
that we are always getting back more than we're losing.
MR. McCLELLAN: Okay, thanks.
Q Thanks, a lot.
MR. McCLELLAN: Anything else?
Q Yes, can you comment about the report about the Baathists,
that we're encouraging -- or that we would like to see some of the
Baathists -- former Baathists in Iraq participate in the government,
participate in the military? And if that's the case, how will that
help to take the oxygen out of the insurgency?
MR. McCLELLAN: Let me tell you where we are. We are reviewing how
the policies are being implemented and looking at how we can better
balance the need for expertise and experience that Iraqis -- that some
Iraqis have with the need for justice. And so that's something that we
are looking at and we're working to address.
Q But you are -- you are considering letting Baathists
participate?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, we're reviewing the implementation of those
policies, with that balance in mind, and looking at how we might be
able to do a better job of balancing those two needs I just mentioned.
Q Will that help take the air out of the --
MR. McCLELLAN: Like I said, right now, it's under review. So --
Q Why is it under review?
MR. McCLELLAN: We're looking -- well, for the very reason that I
stated. Because, one, you want to make sure that people are being held
accountable and being brought to justice. But you also have to balance
that and look at the need to have expertise in the different sectors
within Iraq.
Q What's going to be the U.N. resolution that you're discussing
with the British?
MR. McCLELLAN: What's going to be in it?
Q Yes.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that those discussions are things
that are ongoing at this point. So I wouldn't want to speculate about
that. Let's let those discussions continue.
Q But it will be international participation --
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, absolutely. We -- and we said that we would
welcome a new resolution that could help encourage more countries to
participate in Iraq, come the time that sovereignty is transferred to
the Iraqi people.
Q What's the White House's assessment of the situation in
Fallujah? And is the President concerned about reports from the
commanders there that -- in the paper today, one general was quoted as
saying an attack is almost inevitable to be needed there?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, one, those are getting into -- if you're
getting into military questions, those need to be directed to our
military leaders in the region. The President has full confidence in
their ability to address these matters. And secondly, there has been
an effort underway to find an Iraqi-centered solution, as Secretary
Rumsfeld talked about earlier in the week. But in terms of the latest
developments there, that's best to direct those questions to the
military leaders and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq for
where that stands.
Q Scott, Malaysia and Pakistan said today that they would
consider sending troops to Iraq if the U.N. took control over there.
Is that something that you're talking to them about?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, like I said, and like we've said previously,
the United Nations, we believe, should be playing a vital role in the
political process, and they have been recently. They've been playing a
vital role in helping him move forward on the transfer of sovereignty
to a representative interim government. They've also had a mission
there working to move forward on the electoral process that is set to
begin next January. And we want the United Nations to continue to play
a vital role.
Obviously, come June 30th, the Iraqi people will be playing the
primary role going forward, because sovereignty will be transferred at
that point in time. We will still be there to help with security and
to help with reconstruction.
Q Will the U.S. will still control all U.S. forces or still
orchestrate all coalition forces there?
MR. McCLELLAN: That's been made very clear by the Coalition
Provisional Authority that when it comes -- and by our military leaders
-- that we will be working in partnership, as we are doing now, with
the Iraqi people and with other coalition partners. But the security
effort is being overseen by the coalition at this point.
Q At that point -- can I ask a quick question? Right at that
point, the U.S. forces will be there at the invitation of the Iraqi
governing body, right? So what happens if they say, we don't want the
U.S. forces here anymore?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think the Iraqi people want the coalition forces
to continue to help provide for the future security of the country.
And that's what -- I think that you're seeing from the coalition firm
resolve to finish the job and help the Iraqi people realize a free and
peaceful future, because that is key to winning the war on terrorism.
A free and peaceful Iraq is important to bringing about greater
stability in a dangerous part of the world. And that is key to winning
the war on terrorism.
So we appreciate all the strong statements of resolve from
coalition partners and we welcome other countries coming in and
participating in the future. And that's why part of this discussion --
we welcome the comments by Mr. Brahimi that he thinks the United
Nations will be moving forward soon on a new resolution to encourage
even broader participation.
Q What did Prince Bandar tell the White House yesterday about
the situation in Saudi Arabia, who was responsible for those attacks
yesterday?
MR. McCLELLAN: Ann, I don't have any update in terms of who is
responsible. Those are questions best directed to the Saudi officials,
at this point. But I've not received any update on responsibility.
Q Can I ask you one question about Senator Hagel's comments
about -- he was saying that there should be a debate about a draft in
the United States because he feels that the burden of fighting the war
on terrorism might not be shared -- being shared fairly across the
board. Does the President believe that having an all-volunteer
military is an effective way that all citizens are equally shouldering
that burden?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that our military leaders have said
that they believe they have the troop leaders necessary to continue
waging and winning the war on terrorism --
Q What about the money?
MR. McCLELLAN: -- and have the troop levels they need to continue
our efforts to win the war on terrorism. And so I think that that's
been addressed by military leaders. And the President -- as I said
yesterday, that is just not something that's under consideration at
this time.
Q What about the fairness issue, as opposed to the troop level
issue?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, the President supports the voluntary military
force that we have now.
Q What about -- do you have enough money? Are you going to
have to ask for more money?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think I went through that yesterday in the
briefing.
Q Let me put it this way. Does the President think that the
American people have a need or a right to know the nation's budgetary
situation, including more spending money needed for the war in Iraq,
before the election?
MR. McCLELLAN: We have been keeping the American people informed
about the funding needs for Iraq going forward. Our Director of Office
of Management and Budget and Pentagon officials have made it very clear
that we will need an additional supplemental to provide additional
resources for our troops in Iraq. But remember, we work to -- the
President has made it very clear that we will provide our troops with
all the resources they need to do their job. And he looks to our
commanders in the theater to make those determinations, in terms of
what is needed.
Q There's no money in --
MR. McCLELLAN: Pentagon officials have told us that at this time,
they have more than enough resources to do their job. And those are
things that are constantly being looked at and evaluated. And those
determinations are based upon circumstances on the ground in Iraq.
And you also have to keep in mind what the security situation is in
Iraq, going forward. So you always have to look at the security
situation going forward. But we've been very clear -- we worked to
pass the $87 billion wartime supplemental to provide our troops with
the resources they needed to do their job. And we said that we would
come back with another supplemental at some point. But it's important
to make sure that you have precise estimates, based on what the
commanders in the field are saying.
Q If the commanders ask for more money and say they need more
money, the President won't wait until after the election to actually
make a request?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, but, Deb, the commanders and the Pentagon
have told us that they have -- but that's getting into speculation --
let's talk about what the situation is -- have told us that they have
more than enough resources to do their job at this time. But we always
look at these issues and we always have to keep in mind the
circumstances on the ground and what the security situation is, as
well. But we will always make sure that our troops have everything
they need to do their job.
Thanks.
END 10:59 A.M. EDT
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