BURLINGTON, N.D. – U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND), a Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee member, hosted U.S. Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary of Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz today to discuss how to improve Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) enforcement of Waterfowl Production Area (WPA) easements in North Dakota. This is her first official visit as Assistant Secretary.
“Landowners and agriculture producers in North Dakota have had to struggle with the Fish and Wildlife Service’s rigidity and heavy-handed enforcement of their conservation easements for a long time,” said Senator Cramer. “The agency has infringed on our property rights and hurt our farmers’ production, and while we made some progress with the Trump Administration by creating new maps with the first-ever appeals process, the bureaucracy has remained intransigent. I thank Assistant Secretary Estenoz for following through on her commitment to come to our state and hear about these concerns directly from North Dakotans. I hope her expertise in wetland management, combined with the input she received today, will help create necessary change within the Fish and Wildlife Service and produce real results for our state.”
The day began with a visit to Smith Farms near Granville, North Dakota, for a firsthand view of the problems with FWS enforcement of WPA easements. The trip was followed by a roundtable with local leaders and North Dakota landowners and agriculture producers.
The Assistant Secretary’s visit is the latest development in Senator Cramer’s efforts to improve FWS’ handling of WPA easements, both in how the land is mapped and how that mapping is enforced. A September 2017 townhall he hosted featured testimony from several North Dakotans upset with federal agents being armed when they came to their property to discuss the easements, a practice which was then walked back by the Trump Administration. In October 2019, then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt
visited the state to hear directly about these issues, which led to FWS
releasing a memorandum establishing a template for consistent enforcement and the first-ever appeals process.
However, a subsequent site visit and roundtable with then-FWS Director Auriela Skipwith in August 2020 revealed the new appeals process was proving ineffective in making the meaningful changes sought by North Dakotans. Senator Cramer
outlined these problems to Assistant Secretary Estenoz during her EPW confirmation hearing in May 2021 and invited her to the state to hear about these problems firsthand, which she did today.
