Angie Craig: “this bill contains extremely important funding for the State of Idaho, along with other items I must clearly support.…”

“this bill contains extremely important funding for the State of Idaho, along with other items I must clearly support. For that reason, I will be voting in favor of this bill. However, I think it is important to make a record of some of the shortcomings of this bill. First, I am extremely disappointed that this bill ignores the concerns of many communities and citizens in the Columbia Basin who worked honestly and deliberately over the years to develop local forest management plans. Those plans will now be summarily overridden by two gigantic environmental impact statements which will dramatically alter all the existing local plans on 144 million acres. It remains my opinion that these EIS's represent an inappropriate application of the National Environmental Policy Act. They are too big; they are too remote for comment by the citizens who will be affected; and they are too complex for any reasonable understanding by any affected party. I am told that this project will have cost the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management up to $30 million. I submit that the advancement of science through this project has been worth but a fraction. Despite my efforts and those of Congressman Nethercutt to interject some common sense and fiscal responsibility, the language we worked hard to support has been dropped.”