Thomas Mott Osborne: “I serve a very rural district, a lot of landowners. Currently, a landowner with an endangered species on his land often…”

“I serve a very rural district, a lot of landowners. Currently, a landowner with an endangered species on his land often sees the species as a threat to his survival. That is not good for the species, and it is certainly not good for the landowner. It is not working. It is largely adversarial. H.R. 3824 provides incentives for landowners to preserve endangered species, and this will help the species, and it will help people as well. In 1978, 50 miles of the Central Platte River in Nebraska was designated as critical habitat for whooping cranes. Only 3 to 4 percent of the whooping cranes visit the Platte River annually. The great majority of whooping cranes never see the Platte River, never visit it at all; and so many have questioned this designation because this designation has led to a cooperative agreement between Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming involving thousands of acres of lands, hundreds of thousands of feet of water to support critical habitat; and it is still not complete after 8 years of spending millions of dollars. So we have case after case after case like this where this thing simply is not working well. Hopefully, applying the best available current science required by this legislation will improve this process. I think it will. I thank the gentleman from California (Chairman Pombo) for his efforts, as well as the gentleman from California (Mr. Cardoza), and ask support for H.R. 3824.”