Public Lands Package

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come first and foremost tonight to thank the staff who worked so hard on this package--and I mean not just over the last few weeks but for literally years--to try to get to an agreement on something we could vote on.

It is not a surprise to the Senate that it is December and people are voting on a lands package. My colleague from Colorado outlined it very well. When you have these bills that deal with water, that deal with public lands, that deal with giving Federal land back to communities so they can improve their communities, and yet designating some special places so they can be preserved for the public, yes, not all of your colleagues care about the details of that, and you are never going to get the leader, who is in control of the Senate, to give you floor time on that bill.

So every December, we are here with a lands package to be considered, and it is a package that has a lot of input from a lot of people, negotiated, in this case, with the House and the Senate, with Democrats and Republicans--a four-corner negotiation.

The missed opportunity tonight, as my colleague from Colorado said, is that we don't get to vote on it. My colleague from Utah is not being correct in that he was offered a chance to have that vote. He was offered a chance to have this bill brought up and to have his ideas voted on. He knew he was going to lose, and he knows he is going to lose in January, but he wants to insist tonight on prevailing. I am not sure why, because, as my colleague from Colorado said, why continue to hold up these small communities from getting the resources they need?

Trust me, communities like Yakima, WA, want answers to the challenges of changing conditions that impact water and the fact that fish and farmers and Tribes and environmentalists all have to get together to solve those problems. So they worked for years on coming up with a solution collectively at the local community and then put that before the U.S. Senate for a hearing and for consideration, and that proposal passed the U.S. Senate, I think, in an 85-to-12 vote 2 years ago, as did permanent reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, 2 years ago, which passed the U.S. Senate.

So if my colleague from Utah is imagining that somehow the Land and Water Conservation Fund being made permanent is not going to pass the U.S. Senate, he is just dreaming of something that is really going to take place and become reality in the very near future. But what you have done tonight is made it a lot harder for us to make sure that we are moving ahead.

This legislation that he refused to allow us to vote on tonight also includes important--I would say one thing. The one thing that maybe you could say hasn't had constant, constant attention over 2 years but certainly has grown in importance is new technology to help our firefighters fight fires, locate where the fire is happening, and GPS systems to help make people more safe. That was in this package and probably, yes, has gotten enhanced a great deal over the last 6 months as we have seen the tragic, devastating impacts of fires throughout the West. So, yes, that was in here and it was part of consideration, and, yes, there was legislative action. Ninety percent of this package either saw legislation passed by the House of Representatives or passed by the Senate--legislation that basically passed out of either a Senate committee or a House committee.

So it is not like these ideas came out of nowhere. They are, as my colleague from Colorado said best, parochial issues that we find very hard to get the rest of our colleagues to ever want to pay attention to the details.

So this has been the tried and true fashion by which the Senate has passed land packages, as long as I have been here, for 18 years. That is what you do in December. You pass a lands package. I wish it were different.

My colleague from Colorado made a good suggestion about 7 or 8 months ago: Why don't we do some right now? Thanks to his initiative, we actually bundled together 15 or 20. But he was right. Guess what. Everybody said: Where is mine? Where is my package? Where is this? I am not going to let you do this, and we were in the same boat. So the best answer to all of that is that in December we will do a lands package.

The notion that people didn't know this was coming is a little bit facetious. Everybody has known that this is the time, and these are the packages and these are the proposals.

To my colleague from Utah, I get it. He is not necessarily in agreement with some of his own delegation who pushed things for Utah that are in this package. I get it. He has a different philosophy about what should happen. I guarantee you that Utah is going to have a lot more debates about what it wants to see for its future, and I think that is ultimately healthy. I can just answer for my State, which has three National Parks and generates millions of dollars from them. I can just answer for my State, which thinks that the outdoor economy is the No. 1 reason we attract and keep high-skilled and unbelievable manufacturing jobs in the Pacific Northwest. Why? Because businesses want to locate there because their workers want to have access to that. My State knows that the outdoor economy--because it has companies like REI--is over $800 billion of annual economy. So, yes, when you invest in public lands, you get more access for hunters and fishers and people who want to go and enjoy and recreate, and for our veterans. So guess what. It is a great economic development tool.

The notion that a State that has public lands doesn't have economic opportunity is not telling the whole story. We all get it. We all represent counties that have nothing but an outdoor economy or public land, and then they want to know how to build a school or a fire station or keep the lights on for basic services. We get that complexity too.

But our colleagues did consider these ideas, and our colleagues did consider the notion that there are diverse opinions. It is just that, at the end of the day, you have to have a vote. You have to be able to come here to the Senate on this subject--that is, lands packages--and have a process.

Listen, if my colleagues who care so much about this want to create a new norm in the Senate that the first week of December will be the deadline for all lands packages, and then by the end of that session we will have lands packages always considered in the Senate, I am all for it. I am all for that right now, because I see devastation happening on water writ large. I see unbelievable problems happening throughout the West just on water.

Now, you can say we are going to do nothing and we are just going to let the courts and the lawsuits and everything play out. But guess what. That is where we were on fire, until what happened? Until the Senators from Montana and the Senators from Idaho and the Senators from Oregon and the Senators from Washington all got together on a fire bill and we said: This is what we think would be great for the West to do to move forward. That is what we were trying to do tonight on water, on other fire measures, and on public lands, and helping veterans and Native Americans in Alaska who never got a fair deal on access to their own land.

So I get that these solutions may take a few pages to print out and for people to read, but they are important public policies that need to have this body's attention, and you are doing nothing but shortchanging the public debate if you will not even allow the bill to come to the floor for that debate.

We are always, always going to get sidelined as individual bills, not being important enough to take up the time of the Senate. It is only collectively, in a bundle like we saw tonight, that they can be considered. But I guarantee you--I guarantee you--that they are not going to grow into a package that becomes less important with time. They are just not. They are just not. They are going to continue to be amplified as important public policies, where a local government--a county or a city--and the Forest Service and BLM and a school district and a community are going to have to work together. They are going to have to work together. They are going to have to work together on water, on fire, on public access, on conveyance, on how we are going to preserve open space, on how we are going to recreate. It is going to be demanded.

I know my colleague from Utah doesn't agree with all these philosophies, but I guarantee you that there are lots of people in Utah who would have loved to have a vote tonight to see how those issues would have played out.

I just want to thank staff. They have worked night and day, literally--literally for months, if not years--on these policies. They have worked so hard to try to find the common good and a place to move forward, and I so appreciate that our leaders are now committing to us to help move this forward in January. We are definitely going to take them up on it. Even though it will be a new Congress and a new House of Representatives, we are going to take it up, and I am sure that our colleagues, Congressman Grijalva and Congressman Bishop, will be there to work with us.

There will never be an easy day to vote on public lands--never. It is just never going to happen. So we had better own up to the responsibility and get the commitment to these cities and communities that need us to help them hold Federal Agencies accountable, to make the investments our constituents want to see, and to solve these problems so our communities can continue to grow and thrive.

I believe these people are bubbling up some of the best ideas on how to move forward. That is what they did in various parts of the West. Whether that was in Montana with what to do at Yellowstone, or whether that was in Alaska with what to do with the Native issue, or Yakima on what to do with water, they are bubbling up the ideas. At least what we can do is give them the courtesy of having a vote so that they can be considered.

I thank the President.

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I just want to thank the Senator from Alaska for her great work and working in such a collaborative way. I am certainly not leaving the Energy Committee and certainly not going to back away from any of these big issues, but certainly, as she said, I will not be working as closely as the ranking member with her as chair. But I am certainly and definitely going to continue to work in a collaborative way.

So I thank her for her kind comments and look forward to what we can do in the new year.
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