Martin Heinrich

We view Senator Heinrich's HUNT Act as an important step forward in the issue of making public lands public.

There's a lot more work to be done. One of the things I'm interested in doing is making sure that the priority that this takes is commensurate with the interest from local residents.

If the agency would do their job managing our lands we wouldn't have to pursue these types of proposals.

You shouldn't have to use a helicopter to access public lands.

We don't know what we don't know.

I think one of the things we need to be doing is working with individual National Forests and the Bureau of Land Management in these various districts to make sure that while we're doing some good things on the access front, that we're not…

I think, if they were adequately prioritized you wouldn't see the kind of incredibly broad support.

I wanted to just take a moment and express my willingness to work with the Senator from Nevada on his search and rescue legislation.

I would just ask quickly for unanimous consent to offer a couple of letters, recent letters, into the record in support of the HUNT Act.

As a hunter himself, Sen. Heinrich probably knows from personal experience the disappointment of finding a locked gate and blocked access to land that should be open to the public but is not.

I think that would better serve the land and frankly, better serve our constituents.

Our public lands provide some of the best hunting and fishing opportunities for American families.

The Department strongly supports the goal of making access to both public lands and to information about the public lands available to the public.

The HUNT Act is meant to deal in easements purely on a voluntary basis.

The bill targets lands that are technically open to the public but are impossible to reach legally because there is no public trail or road leading to them.

Dwindling access to public lands remains the greatest threat to American sportsmen.

I just want to say both of these bills are really an example, a positive example, of how we can work together to produce energy more effectively on this committee.

Timber contracts can absolutely be a useful tool for reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires.

I think their legislation is probably the most promising, bipartisan solution that I've seen for, well, since we started seeing this, sort of, climate induced fire cycle that seems to get worse every year in both treated and untreated…

Under Mr. Bay's leadership FERC has increased transparency in its work, opening in a number of enforcement actions that have helped protect the integrity of energy markets.

I join Senator Domenici in strongly supporting this nomination.

This authority provided FERC new tools to combat the type of market manipulation that produced the devastating power crisis in the West.

Failure is not an option because it means that our communities may run out of safe drinking water.

I look forward to continuing to work with Estevan on the challenges facing our State and the entire West.

The amazing thing is that in our conversations we have sort of educated each other on these two States that are kind of close to each other in the alphabet----