Roy Blunt: “I thank my friends both for supporting this bill and the gentleman from Georgia for yielding to me to talk about it a…”

“I thank my friends both for supporting this bill and the gentleman from Georgia for yielding to me to talk about it a few minutes. This is a bill, as the gentleman from California said, that the House has passed at an earlier time. It does seem occasionally that even in a very small, local issue that it takes an act of Congress to resolve a problem that one would think that common sense would be able to resolve, but in this case that is not the case and it takes this bill, Senate bill 1167, to provide a speedy resolution to really a boundary dispute affecting private property owners in my district. The historic boundary lines neighboring the Mark Twain National Forest and Table Rock Lake in Missouri's Barry County and Stone County were blurred when the U.S. Forest Service decided in the recent past to restore the mid-1800s Corners Program. The only problem with restoring this program is that nobody, including the Corps of Engineers, had paid any attention to it since the mid-1880s and land surveys conducted in the 1970s by and for the Corps of Engineers have found that major discrepancies would be the case if these old markers somehow became the rule of how property would be determined. Instead, property has been based on a 1950s survey when Table Rock Lake was built. A fight with the Federal Government over a boundary line can really be an uphill battle, as we all know or could imagine.”