Rob Bishop: “I appreciate having the ability to speak after Mr. Grijalva, my good friend from Arizona, so I can bring some balance to…”

“I appreciate having the ability to speak after Mr. Grijalva, my good friend from Arizona, so I can bring some balance to the rhetoric that we are doing because somebody has to realize that the ideas of conservation, recreation, and economic development in the vast territories we have in the West are not mutually exclusive. They never have been. They never need to be. But the bill we have in front of us today is very unbalanced. It is pretty ideological, and as Yogi Berra used to say: ``It's deja vu all over again.'' This puts 1.5 million acres, as has been said, in new wilderness designations and over 800 miles of wild and scenic rivers, which destroys or shuts down all forest management activity in those particular areas, including things like fuel reduction and wildfire mitigation. To put this in perspective for some of you, especially those in the East, in the last 10 years, 7.3 million acres of our most restricted public lands have been burned out. That is like burning the entire State of Massachusetts, all of which was set in this kind of restrictive area. Now, what the majority wants to do, what the Democrats want to do, is add more to that potential problem. It is unbalanced simply because there is not a single Republican who has cosponsored any of these bills in this package, including the two Colorado Republicans who are most directly impacted by this package. This puts critical military-readiness training at risk.…”