From Robert Miller, Danbury News Times:
There’s a 202-acre collection of lands on Coltsfoot Mountain in Cornwall which the town’s Conservation Trust wants to preserve.
The state of Connecticut agrees. This fall, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection gave the trust a $404,300 grant toward the land’s purchase.
But down in Washington, D.C., the US Congress has become legislatively torpid.
Among the things it didn’t do this year is to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, something it’s done since 1964 when the fund began.
Nor did it allocate any spending for projects in the pipeline, which usually runs $400 million to $450 million a year.
Therefore the Cornwall Project is missing some funding for the Coltsfoot Mountain Land.
That money would come from the Highland Conservation Act. It, in turn, gets its money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, said Tim Abbott, regional conservation director for the Housatonic Valley Association.
“It’s everything,” said Abbott of the Land and Water Fund.
