John Curtis

Then help me understand why you wouldn't hold a single public meeting.

We are writing in support of S. 1435/H.R. 3397, legislation that would require the Director of the Bureau of Land Management to withdraw a proposed rule entitled 'Conservation and Landscape Health'.

Fire is an all-hands issue, and wildland fires don't respect boundaries, right?

It does give us an opportunity and a platform to talk about some of these issues on a really bipartisan level.

I would love to join my colleague, Mr. Neguse, in a bipartisan manner to deal with these preventative issues.

How is that acceptable? These--remember these chemicals are critical for many things in the healthcare industry...

Today, I rise with a profound sense of reverence and humility to honor the legacy of a true American hero, Mr. Ken Potts. Mr. Potts was one of the last two USS Arizona survivors who recently passed away at 102. On the morning of December…

I appreciate your professionalism.

Just for the sake of time, I am just going to leave that footnote with you that, of course, the state of Utah would love to be deeply involved in both identifying and managing those areas.

I am going to make you a proposal that we would love to host you in Utah.

We feel very good about the relationship.

Our relationship with you is just critical.

My colleague Rep McClintock and I sent a letter to you last year urging you to end the Let Burn policies.

My district is not only rural, half of it is classified as frontier. Now layer over top of that that the vast majority of it, 90 percent of the land, is owned by the Federal Government.

I think we as lawmakers and policy makers need to understand it is not as easy as waving a wand and protecting all of this area because we have designated it.

We are taking that responsibility away from the state, and we are going to take that, and I think when we make these decisions, we have to step up for that.

But it is not staff, it is budget.

We must do this to protect and preserve this area. We don't trust the state, we don't trust the county, we don't trust the elected officials to do this as they have done it for many, many decades.

How in the world does the Federal Government propose to do what it said it was going to do when it made this a monument designation and took the stewardship away from the local people?

We feel like we preserve and protect that area in a magnificent way, and now the Federal Government has taken it over without adding any resources.

When we talk about these delays, 90 percent of this property, you--it takes years and years and years to permit.

Almost 20 years after the passage of the Energy Policy Act in 2005, we still do not have enough petroleum engineers, geologists, and staff within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to support development of Indian energy resources.

Today, there is far more looting, far more grave robbing, vandalism in this area.

It's a great bill. It actually passed on a bipartisan basis in the 115th Congress, and I'd to commend this bill to my colleagues as one possible solution to help us move through this.

I think it is imperative that your agency is able to make this a non-political issue, and assure people that it really is, in the long term, saving taxpayers money by spending this money.