Rob Bishop: “the other maps were in green and red. Mine is in blue, and my chart is to show in the blue the total amount of each…”

“the other maps were in green and red. Mine is in blue, and my chart is to show in the blue the total amount of each State's land that is now combined and controlled by the Federal Government. You can see an obvious change in States here that in the West who, when they were admitted to the States, were admitted with certain conditions for the yielding of that State land. It was unilaterally changed by the Federal Government in the 1950s, and in the 1970s when the PILT program came into effect, it was somehow to try and offset the impact of those particular changes. The Department of the Interior said 2 years ago when they took over the funding of the PILT issue they would ensure appropriate emphasis. It has not happened to this date. This amendment would actually do that by putting PILT up to what was appropriated last year and to where the Senate purports to be at the end of this year's session. Let me just say that in the short time I have to finish, the Washington Post has endorsed this amendment. You may not have known that because they do not know it either, but last year, they wrote the Federal Government is the largest landowner in Washington, DC, and since this land cannot be taxed, the Federal Government is the principal contributor to the district's chronic fiscal imbalance. That is our point for those of us in the West exactly.…”