Taxpayer First Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, I represent the Sierra Nevada of California. Yosemite Valley, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, and Lake Tahoe are all within my district.

The Yosemite Land Grant Act signed by President Lincoln in 1864 was the first time the Federal Government set aside land for ``public use, resort, and recreation . . . for all time.''

Today, the Federal estate has grown to 640 million acres. That is 28 percent of the land area of our Nation. While the Federal Government owns just seven-tenths of 1 percent of New York State and 1.8 percent of Texas, it owns 46 percent of my home State of California and 93 percent of Alpine County in my district.

Now, we in the Sierra revere our public lands, and we are proud to share them with the world. But the Federal Government now holds far more land than it can take care of. The Federal lands now face a $20 billion backlog of deferred maintenance, which makes tourism less desirable.

Now, this is all land that is off the local tax rolls, denying our local governments vital revenues. Federal restrictions on productive use of these lands has devastated local economies and, worst of all, the Federal Government has utterly neglected the management of our forests to the point that they have become morbidly overgrown and now present a constant threat of catastrophic fire.

Now, shouldn't we take care of the land we already hold before we acquire still more land? And when we have already taken two-thirds of Alaska and Utah and four-fifths of Nevada, shouldn't we pause and ask for some balance around the country?

Now, this measure does provide enough money over the next 5 years to address about half of our current deferred maintenance needs, and that is very good. But then that funding disappears, and we are left with locked-in, billion-dollar-a-year mandatory spending in perpetuity for new land acquisitions placed outside of Congress' control, while removing the requirement that future acquisitions be focused where the Federal Government owns very little land.

It means that unelected bureaucrats will have a billion-dollar-a-year slush fund to take private property off the tax rolls with no accountability to our local communities, no provisions for long-term maintenance, and no reforms to protect our people from the scourge of wildfire produced by the continuing neglect of our Federal forests.

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