Political Quotes

“Mr. President, there are a lot of good things in this bill that we are discussing. There are a lot of good amendments that have been brought to the floor. There has been an awful lot of conversation over the past year about a program called the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It is a straightforward program that has been around for a long time. It takes money from revenue from offshore oil drilling and it uses that money to purchase land, usually next to a national park or in other areas, and that becomes Federal land. The problem is that over the decades we have continued to accumulate more money in the Land and Water Conservation Fund and we have continued to accumulate more land onto the Federal roll but we are not taking care of what we have. The issue with this particular version of the Land and Water Conservation Fund is that it is not a short-term extension the way it has always been in the past; it is a permanent program put in place-- permanent meaning there are no changes. So permanently we put in a structure that continues to purchase Federal lands without maintaining those lands. We all know it. We all see it. Year after year, everyone has said we should add more to maintenance, but year after year we just buy more land using the Land and Water Conservation Fund and never use other budget funds for maintenance because, quite frankly, there are a lot of other vital Federal issues that need to be paid for.…”