Political Quotes

“I stand today to encourage my colleagues to support my amendment No. 71. This amendment would solve a problem that has severely hamstrung oil and gas development on Federal lands, a problem that is particularly severe in the Western United States and that involves excessive delays in the issuing of permits by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Federal law requires the BLM to approve or deny these permits within 30 days. They have 30 days to go one way or the other. But according to a report issued last year by the inspector general within the U.S. Department of Interior, BLM took an average of 228 days to approve each drilling permit in 2012--228 days. That is 7\1/2\ months. That is a lot longer than the 30 days under Federal law. In Moab and in Salt Lake City, UT, the average processing delay is 220 days. In Price, UT, the backlog is around 250 days. It doesn't have to take this long. In fact, to explain why, let's look at how States handle it. State governments, by comparison, process these same permits in 80 days or less. Approval of these permits is further complicated by endless environmental reviews, reviews that sometimes can take years upon years. The result of all this redtape is a serious backlog of about 3,500 permits. My amendment would address this problem in a few ways. First, it would require BLM to issue a permit within 60 days of receiving an application.…”