Gabe Vasquez: “Mr. Speaker, first, coming from New Mexico, let me tell you that I have gone through the RMP process firsthand in my own…”

“Mr. Speaker, first, coming from New Mexico, let me tell you that I have gone through the RMP process firsthand in my own Las Cruces district, the TriCounty RMP, and those are long and painful processes. They take a lot of public input and a lot of painful meetings. Those plans are developed with the input from residents from all sides of the aisle who represent different parts of what are our public lands and that mandate to have multiple-use lands. They are not meant for just one industry. They are meant for everybody that uses those public lands. When I served on the U.S. Federal committee to advise the Forest Service, we got all of these stakeholders together to implement the 2012 planning rule, and it was the same deal. We did it deliberately. We did it with all stakeholders at the table. These RMPs are actually developed with public input from every community, not from one single stakeholder group. That is the painful process that it takes to update these plans, many of which haven't been updated since the 1980s.”