Heinrich, business group tout economic impact of national monuments
By Michael Coleman / Journal Washington Bureau
Wednesday, April 6th, 2016 at 10:28am
... Sen. Martin Heinrich joined Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid at a Capitol Hill news conference this morning to tout the findings released by a left-leaning interest group called the Small Business Majority. The report comes as debate over the Antiquities Act heats up in Congress. The Act, passed in 1906, was designed to protect significant cultural and natural resources, but some conservatives argue that it gives the nation’s chief executive too much power to block large swaths of public land from development.
Heinrich, a Democrat in his first term, has made public land preservation a key part of his legislative agenda and he strongly encouraged Obama to designate both the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks monument near Las Cruces and the Rio Grande del Norte monument near Taos. Obama made the designations in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
Heinrich has long endorsed the idea that wilderness protections generate revenues for local communities in the form of hotel stays, restaurant visits and purchases of outfitting equipment, fishing and hunting guides and other activity ...
The Small Business Majority arrived at its $156 million annual economic impact estimate based on an average of 3.9 million non-local visitors to the 17 national monuments analyzed in the study between 2011 and 2015 ...
http://www.abqjournal.com/752386/politics/heinrich-business-group-tout-economic-impact-of-national-monuments.html
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