Bill Lee: “a little over a month ago, I stood before this body to object to the massive public lands package that it was poised to…”

“a little over a month ago, I stood before this body to object to the massive public lands package that it was poised to pass. This bill, some 680 pages long, was released at 10 a.m. that morning--that very morning when they first wanted us to pass this. My staff and I had not seen it beforehand, and we had been given no time to read it. This is, of course, really bad process--terrible process. This is not the way legislation should be written. It is not the way legislation should be debated. It is, of course, never ever the way legislation should be passed. In addition to the bad process, I objected at the time because I suspected that it also contained bad policy--bad policy that would disproportionately and negatively affect my State of Utah. Now we find ourselves today, more than a month later, at a moment at which we are considering the bill. During that time period, I have, of course, had time to read the bill. Unfortunately, those suspicions that I had about the bill have since been confirmed. This bill perpetuates a terrible standard for Federal land policy in the West, particularly for the State of Utah. To give one some background, the Federal Government owns more than 640 million acres of land. This is a staggering amount of real estate-- an amount of land that in its totality is larger than the entireties of France, Spain, Germany, Poland, Italy, the United Kingdom, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands combined--all of them.…”