Patricia Schroeder: “Mr. Chairman, I stand as a westerner to engage myself in this debate. Mr. Chairman, there seemed to be a protest from…”

“Mr. Chairman, I stand as a westerner to engage myself in this debate. Mr. Chairman, there seemed to be a protest from the other side that there was nobody talking from the West. Colorado is from the West. I was born in the West, Oregon, and I have letters here from my very own district saying that they really do believe that volunteers are very essential. I have a letter here from a women in my district talking about how important these surveys are and that as an Audubon volunteer she is willing to go out and do all of this. You just heard about private property, private property, private property. Guess what; you cannot go on private property as a volunteer without permission of the owner. So that is kind of a bogeyman that someone is throwing out there. The other thing you hear about volunteers are biased, what do you mean? How can you be biased in favor of birds, or biased in favor of migratory birds? I do not understand what all this bias, bias means. I assume that these are good citizens who are wanting to go out and take a look at what the wildlife is looking like, and they are trying to monitor it. There is never enough money to get that kind of information, I cannot understand what they are talking about, whether they are going to be biased or not.”