NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT ACT--Resumed

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about S. 47, a bill I authored with Senator Murkowski. It is a package of public land issues that has been working its way through the Congress now for several years.

I would like to point out to people who may not be as familiar with the Interior side of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee's work, that the Interior side has a long history in our Nation. We decided a long time ago that we needed to have oversight and management of our public lands. S. 47, the legislation that is before us today, is a recognition that our climate is changing and that we need new tools to carry out new responsibilities as it relates to managing those public lands.

I thank my colleague from Alaska, Senator Murkowski, for her incredible leadership. I know we are going, hopefully, to go to final passage of this bill sometime today, and I thank her for her good bipartisan work on this legislation. It is safe to say that even though we both come from the Pacific Northwest, we don't see eye to eye on every issue, but we have worked hard to try to give local communities the resources they need and to maintain the national interest where the national interest was at stake. So I can't applaud my colleague enough for her hard work and for her dedication to getting this particular package moving through the Senate.

I also want to thank a lot of the staff who have worked on this issue because I know that it is about the hard work of legislating. There are many issues about which maybe not everybody understands all of the details to, but, I guarantee you, all the details were critically important. So I want to in particular thank Mary Louise Wagner, the minority staff director for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee until recently. I certainly also want to thank the dynamic duo of David Brooks and Sam Fowler who, as counsel to the committee, have played an incredible role over the last many years in preserving what is most important about our public lands. I also want to thank, additionally, Bryan Petit, Rebecca Bonner, Amit Ronen, and several of the staff who have worked on many of the aspects of this package; Camille Touton, Melanie Stansbury, and David Reeploeg and Megan Thompson who played key roles in the Yakima provisions. And Angela Becker-Dippmann who previously worked on this legislation.

I also thank Senator Murkowski's staff, Brian Hughes, Kellie Donnelly, and particularly, Lucy Murfitt. I don't think we ever could have gotten this package through without her due diligence and hard work. I thank Lane Dickson and Michelle Lane.

I also thank my colleagues in the House of Representatives. I certainly want to thank the staff director for Congressman Grijalva, David Watkins, but I also thank Chairman Grijalva for his hard work and Congressman Bishop. It is safe to say that all four of us, working together--Senator Murkowski, myself, Congressman Bishop, and Congressman Grijalva--definitely didn't always see eye to eye on these issues, but we worked hard to resolve these issues. I also thank my colleagues, Congressman Dave Reichert and Congressman Dan Newhouse, for their work on provisions related to Washington State.

Before I get started in talking about the major provisions of this legislation and why they are so important, I also have to call out several of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have played key roles.

Certainly, the historic Utah wilderness provision would not be this lands package without my former colleague, Senator Orrin Hatch. He played such an incredible role over a long period of time in shaping the provisions as they affect Utah, and I thank him for that and for working with our colleague on this side of the aisle, Senator Durbin, on that important aspect of the package.

We would not be where we are today on the fire provisions without my colleague Senator Gardner. Both Washington and Colorado have taken it on the chin time and again with devastating forest fires, and we know why it is so important to give firefighters and the land managers the best possible tools available to locate the fires and keep track of frontline firefighters.

We need a more hasty response to putting out fires, and having GPS and tracking systems are going to help us do that. So I thank my colleague from Colorado for helping with this legislation.

It is safe to say that without the strong determination of Senator Burr, we probably wouldn't be here right now on the permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Making the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanent represents the ethos that we have in the Senate here today that public lands are important to our Nation. They are important for recreating, for hunting, for fishing, for moving forward on access to these lands that are important for our veterans, for our school children, and for those who just may want to go out and access the outdoors and reconnect.

We have had a big discussion here about whether we should return public lands to oil and gas drilling, and this bill basically says no, we are going to make a bigger investment in our public lands.

We are going to make this program permanent, and we are going to make sure it is a key tool to continue to solve our problems of access to public land, particularly in parts of the country where access to those public lands is being eroded by development. That is exactly what the Land and Water Conservation Fund helps us do--to protect those areas so that either we can continue to have, for example, elk hunting, for which we did a big project in southwest Washington, or whether it is helping to improve access to Mount Rainier, a huge economic asset to the State of Washington, or whether it is as simple as giving a community like Auburn or Gas Works Park in Seattle access to a program that can help us keep open space in some of our most developing areas.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund has been a preeminent program for access to public lands, but it had been threatened when Congress allowed it to expire 3 years ago, then only having a temporary reauthorization, and then failing again to reauthorize it last September.

What we are doing here now is saying that this is a bipartisan issue, that more than 60 Senators here in the Senate didn't just see that we needed to further adjust this program but we needed to save this program. I emphasize this because I know my colleagues here in the Senate are going to go on to a larger discussion, which is to secure the funding that is set aside for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and how it is spent, and we are going to get into a conversation about how we take care of our maintenance and the backlog at our national parks. I definitely believe that the mandatory spending for LWCF should be in a future budget, and I certainly believe we should do more to take care of our backlog and maintenance at our national parks. So I look forward to working with both sides of the aisle to push that through the U.S. Senate.

This legislation is amazing because there are some--particularly in this administration--who want to use public lands to oil and gas drilling, but there is a bipartisan group here in the U.S. Senate who has said: No, we want to put more focus on saving our public lands. This legislation preserves over 1.3 million acres of new wilderness, and 367 miles of wild and scenic rivers. It allows conveyances of land but also protects lands from potential mining and development projects--like removing the threat of mining and development in the Methow Valley in the State of Washington. It also continues to make investments in heritage areas that are important to many parts of the United States of America.

I want to talk about how this bill invests in water. The water issues are like fire; they are not going to go away. The only question is going to be this: What kinds of tools do we give communities across the West--and I should say probably throughout the United States--to deal with the changing climate and the impacts of less and less water?

What this legislation says for ideas like the Yakima Basin Project is that we are not going to divide people and choose farming over fish. We are not going to divide people and choose one aspect of the environment over the other. It says that we are going to look to smart, holistic, and cost-effective ways to preserve more water and enact smart conservation across our State and country.

This is so important because the water issues are not going to go away, but this legislation represents important new tools to fight those challenges and to move forward in a way that I think will prove to be an example of what we should be doing in other parts of the United States.

I look forward to working with my colleagues in trying to fund more water infrastructure improvements and conservation. I think this is just as important as any other infrastructure investment we are talking about in the U.S. Senate today. I know we see congestion in our streets. I know we need to do more on aviation infrastructure. But I guarantee you that we need to do more on water, and I look forward to working with my colleagues on these challenges in the future.

One aspect that I don't know if my colleagues on the floor have as much interest in as Senator Murkowski and I do, but there is a provision on volcano monitoring that is very important to us.

Having experienced the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State and having active volcanoes in both Washington and Alaska, it is so important for us to have the right science and monitoring of these volcanoes. I was glad to work with my colleague Senator Murkowski on that provision to give the latest and best tools to our scientists so that they can give us the best information for the future.

All in all, this legislation is a major investment in our public lands. It is the kind of hard work that happens behind the scenes that not everybody pays attention to. I guarantee you that when you use the word ``land,'' there are a lot of people to pay attention to. There are local communities. There are landowners. There are environmental interests. There are all sorts of very, very thorny issues that have to be worked out. I thank all of my colleagues for their due diligence on this.

Some people have said: Why is it that a lands package comes together only at the end of a Congress or, in this case, held over from last Congress into this session? I hope our colleagues will give more attention to these important public policies.

Public lands and access to those lands is an economic juggernaut. Behind finance and healthcare, the outdoor economy is the third most important sector. So for something that important, let's pay more attention. Let's give the tools to local communities and to these resources to manage this, to give more access to the American people, and to do the things that will help us grow jobs and help us recreate for the future and preserve against a very challenging and threatening climate.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

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