Political Quotes

“Madam President, I have introduced legislation to authorize the Federal Government to dispose of a piece of property on Alaska's North Slope that it no longer needs or wants but is of great importance to the Inupiat residents of the North Slope. Specifically, I am introducing a companion bill to legislation that has also been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by my friend and fellow Alaskan, Congressman Don Young. This legislation would enable the Olgoonik Native Village Corp. of Wainwright, AK to purchase at fair market value the 1,518-acre Wainwright Short Range Radar Site, SRRS, located in northern Alaska. Originally deployed as the location for a Distant Early-Warning, DEW, Line radar station in northern Alaska, President Harry Truman withdrew the site for use as a military radar station during the Cold War in 1952. That station expanded in 1957 to enable the Air Force to track aircraft or rockets entering U.S. air space from the polar region. The station at Wainwright actually had a rather short lifespan, as its radars were replaced by more powerful systems in other locations starting in 1963. In the years since then, the buildings and a fuel tank farm near an airstrip at the site--located several miles southeast of the village of Wainwright on Wainwright Inlet--have been abandoned by the U.S. Air Force. In 1974, the site was given to the Federal Bureau of Land Management, BLM, to manage. In 1976, the lands, then located in the Naval Petroleum Reserve No.…”