Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 1612, a bill I introduced last year to help repair and restore our Nation's public lands while employing and training thousands of young Americans and promoting the culture of public service. In 1993, when the Public Lands Corps was established through the good work of our late colleague Bruce Vento of Minnesota, there were huge backlogs of labor-intensive work on national park lands, forests, wildlife refuges, historic sites, and Indian lands. Unfortunately, we still face those challenges and more. Years of inadequate funding have put our Federal land management agencies further behind on vital maintenance work, while infrastructure continues to crumble. Despite the best efforts of these underfunded agencies, natural and cultural resources are being neglected, and in many places the effects of climate change are magnifying earlier problems such as fire risk, damage by insects and invasive species, coastal erosion, and fragmented habitat. The stimulus bill we passed in the first session has begun to attack the problem, but is only a start. Much remains to be done on the public lands. My bill, H.R. 1612, will expand and reinvigorate an existing program, the Public Lands Corps, by streamlining its management, modernizing its scope, and providing new tools to help the program accomplish its mission, putting young people to work repairing our most treasured resources.…”