Natural Resources Management Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, pending, we have an amendment of mine coming up. We have a large lands package with the Land and Water Conservation Fund, with a lot of lands, transitional properties. A lot of things are coming up in this.

There are multiple reforms that are built into it, but we missed one. I think it is important that we deal with this before we do a long- term, permanent reauthorization of this program because when this Congress does a permanent reauthorization, we seldom ever get back to it. We say: It is moving, and there are other things that need to be dealt with. It becomes less important.

My amendment has two basic parts. It addresses two critical issues of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. One of them is that the Land and Water Conservation Fund is set up to purchase new properties, but if there is a problem on that piece of property that we purchased, there is no requirement to fix it.

Here is how it works: The fund actually purchases the property, and then the hope is that Congress will then appropriate dollars separately to do the repairs to open up the property. So it is announced to the community that this new area will be opened up as public lands, but when the purchase is actually done, there is a big sign on it saying ``closed for safety repairs.'' Those repairs may cost $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, and there is a wait of sometimes 10 years or more before the actual appropriation is done.

This is an easy fix. This fix should be noncontroversial. When we purchase property with the Land and Water Conservation Fund, if there is any maintenance needed on that property, then that needed maintenance is also taken care of by the Land and Water Conservation Fund at the same time. It has to be budgeted in. That way, we don't purchase property and then wait a decade to actually put it into public use. That doesn't make sense to anyone. Everyone walks by it and says: Here is inefficient government again. We bought this property, but there is a different pot of money to fix it up, and we have to wait a decade.

I hope that this is noncontroversial to all us and that we see the common sense in this.

In this package, there is some land that we will purchase and literally not be able to use for who knows how long. There is a hope for future appropriations at some point to deal with safety issues so that people will be able to actually use the land.

The second part of this deals with the past because this has been the process for a while. We purchase new properties and try to put them into use but can't because they came with maintenance issues. We have other public lands, such as our national parks, where there is $11 billion in backlogged deferred maintenance, with no plan to actually fix those. Let me give some examples. We have all heard of Yellowstone. There is $100 million of deferred maintenance at just that one park, with no plan to fix it.

The simple answer is that the Land and Water Conservation Fund is set up to purchase new properties when needed. Allocate just 5 percent of it to go to the deferred maintenance backlog. That still leaves 95 percent of it to purchase additional properties when we need to. But we need to seriously deal with the $16 billion total backlog, and $11 billion of that is deferred maintenance in our national parks.

This is not a poison pill. This shouldn't be a controversial amendment. This is an amendment to help fix an ongoing problem. If we don't fix it, 10 years from now, we will all regret that it was not done. What I suspect is, if we put this in place and actually set aside some dollars for deferred maintenance, by next year, every Member of this body will say: You know what, there is a national park in my State where there are some broken-down buildings that are boarded up that no one can use. Let's try to get access to those maintenance dollars to fix it.

Fine. We can pick whatever order we need to pick from to get to them. Let's start repairing. Let's not be a bad landowner who purchases and never repairs and has no plan to repair. This is simple, straightforward, and should be common sense. Let's not add properties that we can't pay for. Let's not add properties with a maintenance problem and no plan to actually fix it. That is what the amendment is all about that is coming up in the very next vote we take. I look forward to its passage so we can actually get some of these repairs done.
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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, only in Washington, DC, and the Federal Government would we say that we want to do something, but we can't do something. My hope is that we will do something.

Long-term, we all see it. I agree that it is the same thing that we always deal with. It is always down to the time and to the moment.

This is one of these dialogues we have had for a long time, asking how we can deal with deferred maintenance that is $16 billion and growing and with no plan to shrink it. In fact, we are adding lands in this bill that, when we pass the bill, will increase the amount immediately, and there is no plan to take care of that.

The simple request is that we should actually take care of deferred maintenance when we buy it so that we are not adding property with deferred maintenance on day one, and we should have a plan to deal with deferred maintenance that we have--the $16 billion. Without that plan to actually deal with it and without a plan to deal with it the first day with products that we buy, we are adding to the deficit immediately.

This is an issue we have to resolve long-term, and it will not get better. My concern, as I have expressed, is that this is a permanent reauthorization. We don't ever have to come back to it. I hope we do, but we don't ever have to come back to it, and this Congress is notorious for only doing things we have to do.

So we will see how things go in the future with this.

With that, I yield back.

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