Rob Bishop: “Let's get a couple of things very clear. First of all, this is not about the Land and Water Conservation Fund. We…”

“Let's get a couple of things very clear. First of all, this is not about the Land and Water Conservation Fund. We reauthorized permanently the Land and Water Conservation Fund in the last Congress, and in doing that, in a House Republican bill, I might add, we took the State-side projects--these are the kinds of things like easements and picnic grounds and roads and parks that your constituents are all telling you that they like, those are called the State-side projects--and we actually increased the funding for those programs. We also put in that act a limitation on the amount of money that could be used to buy more land. This bill is about that concept, the limitation of land acquisition. The special interest groups have been putting pressure on you and are giving you misinformation about this particular thing. They simply want to circumvent the limits that were pushed in that bill that was there earlier. This is two bills merged together. The first one was the old H.R. 1225, the backlog maintenance bill that Mr. Grijalva referred to in his speech. We wanted to see if we could actually help parks and other public lands who are having a maintenance backlog that is near $20 billion today. Many people, 330 people, cosponsored that bill. Obviously, it was popular. But for 1\1/2\ years, Democratic leadership failed and refused to move that bill.…”