Political Quotes

“pending, we have an amendment of mine coming up. We have a large lands package with the Land and Water Conservation Fund, with a lot of lands, transitional properties. A lot of things are coming up in this. There are multiple reforms that are built into it, but we missed one. I think it is important that we deal with this before we do a long- term, permanent reauthorization of this program because when this Congress does a permanent reauthorization, we seldom ever get back to it. We say: It is moving, and there are other things that need to be dealt with. It becomes less important. My amendment has two basic parts. It addresses two critical issues of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. One of them is that the Land and Water Conservation Fund is set up to purchase new properties, but if there is a problem on that piece of property that we purchased, there is no requirement to fix it. Here is how it works: The fund actually purchases the property, and then the hope is that Congress will then appropriate dollars separately to do the repairs to open up the property. So it is announced to the community that this new area will be opened up as public lands, but when the purchase is actually done, there is a big sign on it saying ``closed for safety repairs.'' Those repairs may cost $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, and there is a wait of sometimes 10 years or more before the actual appropriation is done. This is an easy fix. This fix should be noncontroversial.…”