Joel Hefley: “I must object to the bill before us, Senate bill 2547, the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve Act. This bill…”

“I must object to the bill before us, Senate bill 2547, the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve Act. This bill has never been the subject of hearings in the House of Representatives before the Committee on Resources. National parks should not be designated without going through the process. The gentleman from Utah (Mr. Hansen) and I have worked long and hard in that committee, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Hansen) is chairman of the Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands, to see that there is a logical process for naming national parks. One of the reasons for that is that we love national parks. We are proud of our national parks, and we do not have the resources, it seems, to take care of the national parks we have like they should be taken care of. We have in Yellowstone, one of the jewels of the system, in Yosemite, we have roads that have potholes in them; we have guardrails that are falling down, all kinds of maintenance things that we simply do not have the resources to take care of evidently because we are not doing a very good job of it. So when we add national parks, that draws on all the other national parks, and the pie is divided up that much more. The main thing is it ought to go through a logical process. The gentleman from Utah (Mr. Hansen) and I several years ago put in legislation in place to see that that would happen. What ought to happen with this bill is that next year we ought to have hearings on it.”