The HUNT Act is meant to deal in easements purely on a voluntary basis.

Thank you for holding this important oversight hearing on the impact of catastrophic disasters on Indian Country.

We view Senator Heinrich's HUNT Act as an important step forward in the issue of making public lands public.

There's a lot more work to be done. One of the things I'm interested in doing is making sure that the priority that this takes is commensurate with the interest from local residents.

If the agency would do their job managing our lands we wouldn't have to pursue these types of proposals.

We don't know what we don't know.

I think, if they were adequately prioritized you wouldn't see the kind of incredibly broad support.

I wanted to just take a moment and express my willingness to work with the Senator from Nevada on his search and rescue legislation.

I would just ask quickly for unanimous consent to offer a couple of letters, recent letters, into the record in support of the HUNT Act.

As a hunter himself, Sen. Heinrich probably knows from personal experience the disappointment of finding a locked gate and blocked access to land that should be open to the public but is not.

You shouldn't have to use a helicopter to access public lands.

I think one of the things we need to be doing is working with individual National Forests and the Bureau of Land Management in these various districts to make sure that while we're doing some good things on the access front, that we're not…

I think that would better serve the land and frankly, better serve our constituents.

Our public lands provide some of the best hunting and fishing opportunities for American families.

The Department strongly supports the goal of making access to both public lands and to information about the public lands available to the public.

The bill targets lands that are technically open to the public but are impossible to reach legally because there is no public trail or road leading to them.

Dwindling access to public lands remains the greatest threat to American sportsmen.

I just want to say both of these bills are really an example, a positive example, of how we can work together to produce energy more effectively on this committee.