On the recordApril 18, 2023
this is how the western lands suffer--people from the Eastern United States, with neither the knowledge nor the concern about how they are managed and don't care. And so while they passed something in 2021 to make these firebreaks easier to put in place, as a practical reality, the regulatory hurdles are proving too much. This would fix that. This is reasonable. There is nothing that the Senator from Delaware has pointed to that makes this amendment to this bill objectionable in any way. I urge my colleagues to support it. And if you do so--if you come from the west of Colorado, you know exactly what I am talking about. If you come from the Eastern United States, I beg you to imagine, for a moment, that you represent a Western State, where we have experienced, in some cases, decades of drought and where we are sitting ducks, where we are an island of private land amidst a vast overwhelming sea of Federal land that is chronically mismanaged just because it is physically impossible for them to manage it properly to avoid this kind of thing. I urge you to be sympathetic to this and support it. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.





