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Mr. LUJÁN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I'm pleased that today the House will consider H.R. 2729, a bill that will formally authorize the National Environmental Research Parks at Department of Energy sites across the country, including one in my district at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos National Laboratory includes a landscape of canyons, mesas and mountains, and the Rio Grande, providing a diverse range of ecosystems to explore.

The Los Alamos Park conducts ongoing environmental studies on everything from containment transport to woodland productivity to long-term climate change effects on the land. These parks have been a critical resource to the national and the global environmental research community for decades, yet they have never had a clearly defined source of support in the department before. This bill finally addresses this issue and provides important guidance for research, development, education and outreach on the parks.

H.R. 2729 was developed through a collaborative process that took into account comments and concerns from each of the DOE sites, as well as helpful input and amendments from both minority and majority Members. I'm happy to present a bill with bipartisan cosponsorship, and I look forward to working with our Senate colleagues to send this to the President's desk as soon as possible.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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