Rob Bishop: “as we said at the very beginning of the discussion of this entire bill, there are some amendments that are made in an…”

“as we said at the very beginning of the discussion of this entire bill, there are some amendments that are made in an effort to slow down a bill or stop it from coming to passage. This is not one of those. That is why you will notice very carefully the verbiage here is ``forthwith.'' We want to try and fix the bill so it can go on with its process, not send it back to committee. What I have in front of me here is the poster of the language that you find in the Trail Act itself. What we are debating is not the Trail Act. It's simply an amendment to the Trail Act, and in the act itself it says the appropriate Secretary may utilize condemnation to acquire private property without the consent of the owner. That is the language about which we object. It would be nice if at some time we could actually go in and attack this language and perhaps solve the problem once and for all forever. But as the time is right now, this condemnation power is still in the act. It's still in the bill. It's still in the act. It is still out there as a potential and a possibility. We do not believe that the sponsor ever intended this to be the way of things. But the bottom line is the National Park Service still has the ability of condemning. The Federal Government still has the ability of condemning. As we said before, the committee, the sponsor, tried to solve that problem by saying land will only be taken from a willing seller.…”