On the recordJuly 16, 2015
I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, this is a very legitimate concern that my colleagues are dealing with in terms of how funds are being spent by the restoration programs and how we provide support for the efforts to provide more accountability and improve the transparency of the expenditures of the fund. I appreciate and support my colleague's amendment to improve the makeup of the advisory board, which I think is important. However, I think that adding one more waterfowl representative needs to be done to try to provide additional balance in terms of the representation of the various interests on the board. Let me finally say I represent Grasslands, a large part of Grasslands district, which is the largest part of the Pacific Flyway in terms of almost 200,000 acres of contiguous wetlands, and they have raised some issues as relates to this legislation, and we are going to work those out because, in fact, that is a very important part of the Pacific Flyway. In addition to that, the flexibility that we create in the underlying bill really is, in part, to ensure that we do provide water, even the limited water available, so that we can maintain this important habitat.
