Lisa Murkowski

If you have limitations, part of what I can do as a lawmaker is we can work to change those.

Thank you for making the job easier for those of our Federal partners.

This needs to be addressed. It just needs to be addressed.

I am going to look for a list of proposed changes from you.

I want to know what the barriers are and if we can take some of those down.

If we are recognizing that ANCSA contaminated lands is an environmental justice issue, we are going to try to encourage the Administration to commit to utilizing environmental justice funds.

I think we have made some progress, and that is good. But it is in the category of about damned time we have made some progress.

I guarantee you if they wanted to make it a priority, they would.

But BLM has not more broadly identified cost of remediation throughout the State?

We are seeing increased instances of breast cancer amongst Alaska Native women attributed to the PCBs from FUDS

We are hearing too many of these health-related concerns to not be paying attention to them

The longer the FUDS are contaminated, the more we see the PCB pollution remain in the food chain

So let me ask on that, I think you have outlined the importance of making sure that you are consolidating the information, that everybody is not using different sources there.

I would just ask that through BLM, through Interior, that they play a role as the coordinating lead.

I have suggested that is Interior, the Department of Interior, that would play a very key and a very important role in terms of a coordinating agency.

What we need to do is we need to have an actionable plan.

I would hope the Department of Interior and you as the new BLM State director would be willing to make that commitment.

Everyone recognizes there is environmental injustice that has been done.

We have already identified the responsible parties. We have done that. That is what we began to do in 1998.

The responsibility, full stop, is the Federal Government, and the indigenous people, the Alaska Native people have an expectation that the Federal Government will work out who the responsible party is amongst themselves.

It seems to me that the directive to the BLM was to prepare a cleanup plan for each of the contaminated sites. So just transferring it to the State, then, doesn't seem to be a very fair plan for cleanup.

I would hope that if there is any agreement up here, it is with a recognition that when our Native peoples, our indigenous peoples, are provided or given a promise by the Federal Government that the very basic promise will be kept and that…

If this was any other responsible party, they would be the ones on the hook for doing this.

This is the responsibility, this is an obligation of the Federal Government to basically clean up its own mess.

We recognize that travel here is a little bit different than anywhere else in the Country.