Rob Bishop: “Now there is one other part that should have been part of this discussion and was not allowed by my friends on the Rules…”

“Now there is one other part that should have been part of this discussion and was not allowed by my friends on the Rules Committee. It was briefly addressed by the gentleman from Florida, but he missed the point, I think, that the gentleman from Alaska was trying to make dealing with personal property. Supposedly this issue does not deal with personal property because we are only dealing with BLM property. The difference, though, is with all of those entities within the Bureau of Land Management proposal, there are private inholdings. They have been a constant source of problem and contentions. Unless you specify the significant value of how you are going to treat these inholdings, you make the situation of those private property holders much more difficult. You raise the specter of trying to change access restrictions because, indeed, if you are now going to run this land like the park service land, that will be a problem. Not only do you create another level of bureaucracy to make those trying to solve their problems much more difficult to get equity, you also create all sorts of different solutions to be there that should have been specified in the legislation. Protecting the private property holders' inholdings in those properties right now is one of the values that BLM lands should be doing, and it should be specified. It is not in this bill. The fact that we cannot add that to this bill, because of a ruling on a partisan vote by Rules Committee, is devastatingly wrong.”