There is general agreement among Republicans and Democrats that the differences between the two approaches can be worked out. But there are problem areas that may cause major problems, particularly with the stateside funding.
In the House, there are two types of committees, authorizers and appropriators. LWCF legislation has to get through both of these.
The two committees involved are:
Regula is opposed to stateside funding, at least partially because some of it was grossly misspent when it was last available. He also sees the states as having large budget surpluses and passing significant environmental bond acts recently, e.g. both NY and NJ. The net result is that Republican members of the appropriations committee are unlikely to support stateside funding against the chair's wishes [unwritten rule of how congress operates].
From a NY and NJ viewpoint, the states have little federal land presence and would rather see more stateside money be available to be matched by their existing bond issues. This way the land winds up being managed by the states. The amount of money available to each state is a complicated formula based on the size of the state and its population. This is very favorable to NY and ok for NJ. The Republican bill (introduced by an Alaskan) wants to limit spending west of the 100th meridian (middle of N or S Dakota) because they feel there is already too much public land there. This is also good for NY/NJ because it increases the amount available for the east. However these formulas are very bad for NH, VT, and ME because of small size and low population. Many people are unhappy about the 100th meridian provision.
The Northern Forest Alliance, which includes a band from just east of Syracuse to the Maine coast, would like to see some of the stateside funding be based on a competitive bid process because they think they would get more money that way. [One proposed solution to this problem and the 100th meridian problem is to make more of the stateside money open to competitive bidding. That way the westerners don't have to propose purchases if they don't want to. NY, NJ and the Northern Forest Alliance should not fear having to compete - they have good projects. However it does raise the possible problem of less pork for a local Congressperson to bring home.]
The Sterling Forest acquistion, federal share, came from LWCF funds but at a huge cost to Congress in terms of the time spent arguing over details and ill-will between members. NY would like to see more LWCF money to complete the purchase of the rest of Sterling Forest. One of the HR701 provisions puts a low cap on the amount of individual purchases before the project has to be separately authorized by Congress.
Another provision in HR701 is to limit the use of condemnation for purchasing lands. This was inserted by the "wise use" people trying to protect land owners. However there are two kinds of condemation; eminant domain (general bad from the point of view of land owners) and condemnation (may be good for landowners). The latter case arises in the case of willing sellers because the government cannot pay more than market value for a piece of property. However, the only way of getting the appraisal raised is for the government to condemn the property and take it to the courts, where the land owner may succeed in increasing the appraisal.