In a welcome display of bipartisanship, Montana’s congressional delegation has stepped up with a plan to get the long-delayed North Fork Watershed Protection Act passed.

The one-page bill has been held up in Congress for several years but is seen as a critical piece of legislation to protect the western boundary of Glacier National Park. The bill would ban all future energy leases in the North Fork and Middle Forks of the Flathead River. It is a companion piece to a law passed by British Columbia several years ago that banned mining and energy exploration in its half of the drainage.

The North Fork bill and several other pieces of legislation protecting Montana public lands have been rolled into a defense spending authorization bill that is virtually guaranteed passage.

U.S. Sens. Jon Tester and John Walsh — both Democrats — along with Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Daines have collaborated to get the legislation to the point where passage is now likely.

Also included will be the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act, which was originally introduced by former Sen. Max Baucus. The bill would add about 60,000 more acres of wilderness to the east side of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and protect about 200,000 acres of federal lands from further development such as oil and gas leases.

The Northern Cheyenne Lands Act component would return 5,000 acres of coal reserves to the Northern Cheyenne Indian Tribe. In exchange for making that move, Great Northern Properties of Houston would receive from the Interior department an estimated 112 million tons of coal near Signal Peak Energy’s Bull Mountain coal mine near Roundup.

According to the Associated Press, other provisions would revise federal laws to encourage small-scale hydropower projects, establish a new fee system for cabin owners on public lands, and retain a U.S. Bureau of Land Management field office in Miles City to speed up oil and gas permitting by the agency.

It is, in other words, a complex assortment of legislation, all of which might easily remain bottlenecked in Congress for years, short of this kind of collaborative effort by Montana’s delegation.

The Inter Lake has been a strong supporter of both the North Fork bill and the Rocky Mountain Front legislation for years, and we are hopeful that next week will mark the successful culmination of years of effort by many groups and citizens to make Montana better.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.