$200,000) be used by the National Park Service to look into the historic preservation needs of Indian tribes in general and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in particular. Included in this should be a study of ways to preserve BIA's historic Old Barracks Building at Fort Wingate, New Mexico.

The Committee also recommended that the advance funding of $5 million provided in the 1985 appropriations to support artistic and cultural programs in the National Capital Region not be transferred to the BIA as the Administration requested. Instead, we recommend that the funds should be used to help provide support for these institutions, including the National Building Museum, Capital Children's Museum and the Mary McLeod Bethune Museum and Archives.

to be

AMERICAN CONSERVATION CORPS

The Committee recommended $75 million for fiscal year 1986 used by Federal and State agencies under the Youth Conservation Corps (YCC) program or under the American Conservation Corps (ACC) program should the authorizing legislation (H.R. 99) be enacted. The ACC bill was reported favorably by the Interior Committee on February 27, 1985, Report No. 99-18, part I and was ordered reported by the Education and Labor Committee this week, on April 16.

The purpose of the ACC is twofold: to help provide jobs for the Nation's young people and to help conserve public lands

and community resources.

At the $75 million level, it would be

a modest program that would leverage many times more than that amount in support at the State and local levels.

I would also note that the Committee did not agree with the Administration's request to delete language that provided for funding for the YCC in the fiscal 1985 budget.

FUNDING FOR WAYNE NATIONAL FOREST LAND ACQUISITIONS

Finally, Mr. Chairman, let me add just a word about a matter of particular interest to those of us from Ohio, namely the Wayne National Forest and the need for continued appropriations for acquisitions there. Thanks to your

leadership and that of Mr. Regula, the fiscal 1985

appropriation bill included funds for this purpose, and I want to strongly urge that the fiscal 1986 bill include at least the same $2 million that was in the House bill last year. The need remains great, and especially in the Marietta unit there are significant opportunities to benefit the public through timely acquisition of lands with great recreational and natural

values in an exceptionally beautiful part of "beautiful Ohio".

INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES

Lastly, I would like to indicate my personal support for an appropriation of $500,000 in fiscal 1986 for continuing the Department of the Interior's Western Hemisphere Convention activities authorized under Section 8A(e) of the Endangered Species Act. This amount could be used not only to fund Fish and Wildlife Service activities but also related programs in the National Park Service as well. For example, the National Park Service has provided training and technical assistance to Western Hemisphere Convention signatories in cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund and other conservation organizations.

During the 99th Congress, the Subcommittee on Public Lands will be looking into these and other related international activities, such as the World Heritage Convention and the Man and the Biosphere programs. Although they represent relatively small budget items, they provide many returns, not only to For example, other countries but to the United States as well. the Western Hemisphere Convention provides for the protection of wildlife habitats; this becomes of great importance to the United States in preserving our "native" songbirds, since they actually winter in Central and Latin America and those winter habitats are increasingly threatened by destruction. Also, with the pullout of the United States from UNESCO, it is

"

increasingly important that we fulfill our responsibilities

under various international laws, treaties and other

agreements.

Mr. Chairman, that concludes my statement. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today before your Subcommittee.

Mr. UDALL. Mr. Chairman, this is that season when we always come before this tribunal with hat in hand, sometimes a tin cup, it feels like, but you have always treated us fairly, and I wanted to mention just a few of the items that are in my prepared testimony. Mr. YATES. Please go ahead.

Mr. UDALL. One of our greatest concerns in the Interior Committee, and one of the most frustrating experiences that I have had in my career here, is trying to get a surface mining law working. We have been through a whole bunch of difficulties and it is in shambles, in large part due to the efforts of Secretary Watt to destroy the program and he damn near succeeded.

The resignation of acting director John Ward the other day is another case in point and we are now out searching for another director of the office. In Kentucky and in Virginia, they have erected a loophole out of what we thought was a commonsense provisionthe two-acre exemption. During the development of the law, some people summoned up the image of some little old couple out with a wheelbarrow and a shovel needing some coal to cook the evening dinner and they were going to have to go down to the State Capitol and get a permit so we included a two acre exemption-if you were going to take coal out of two acres or less, you did not have to meet all the environmental reclamations requirements of the law. We now find the little barefoot mom and pop operations like the Grace Company, Pittston and Sun Oil have literally thousands of these two acre exemptions that just happen to be back to back so that you could do them all at one time with these big machines.

And somebody ought to go to jail and somebody ought to pay some fines, but we just do not have the personnel or the equipment to do that job.

And I think that it is shocking. The new computer system that was going to track the violations in the cessation orders has now come up with the great achievement of losing about 500 of these, on the eve of a court ordered deadline. This data has apparently vanished into thin air, and rumor has it that OSM management is considering completely abandoning a long established segment of the system because of this computer problem.

We have had several investigations of OSM and GAO is now involved and I must say that we are having very good cooperation from Secretary Hodel. He knows the problems and we are working with him to try to get them started on solving them.

We are also examining the abandoned mine land program. If you recall in the strip mining deal, we put in a 25 cent fee for every ton of coal mined and we were going to use that money over the years to clean up the old abandoned mine sites. It is a good program, but the money has not been going to the states who need it or to the places where the need is and we are unhappy about that.

Our Committee believes that more federal inspectors are needed in the field right now, and in particular, Tennessee and Oklahoma have been unable to implement their program. It looks like, at least for a time, we might have federal primacy retained in those two states.

So our Committee recommended an increase of $70 million in the overall request for OSM, and the great bulk of this will be the abandoned mine land fund and the rural abandoned mine fund ex