Political Quotes

“Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Chair, I thank Chairman Frelinghuysen and Chairman Calvert for their efforts on this legislation and, in fact, the entire committee. My amendment is simple. It re-prioritizes taxpayer money by moving a small amount of funds from the Bureau of Land Management land acquisition account and redirecting them to the National Park Service maintenance backlog account. Over the years, Congress has sent billions of dollars into these accounts, allowing the Federal Government to acquire roughly 640 million acres. Today the Federal Government owns about 28 percent of all the lands in the United States, including about 40 percent of the land in my home State of Arizona. This ownership and the subsequent management of the 640 million acres comes at a great expense to the American taxpayer and poses overwhelming challenges for land managing agencies. The deferred maintenance backlog for the National Park Service--and I have here a list of those--totals nearly $12 billion. The National Mall alone is almost $800 million in deferred maintenance, and the Grand Canyon National Park is $350 million in deferred maintenance. The list goes on and on. Given these challenges, it defies logic that we would continue to spend millions of dollars to acquire more land that we can't pay to maintain. So I instead incur just $1.4 million of the net yield on this with my amendment to start this process of paying for the backlog.…”