Federal Lands Policy

Floor Speech

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Mr. PEARCE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas. Again, I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from California.

I am sure most of you have seen this chart, but the color red designates the Federal ownership of land. So you can see some of the statistics that were quoted by the gentleman from California that, in the Eastern part of the U.S.--and it begins at New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana--is where the great mass of Federal lands come into play. You might ask why?

These are the States that came in after Teddy Roosevelt was President. So in the early 1900s, he began the policy of holding many of the lands that were supposed to be given back to the States. He wanted the large national parks that we were many times enamored with, the large national forests. But they go beyond that. And that going beyond, that holding of land that has productive use but will not be used productively by the government, is the great source of economic problems in the West.

Now, in New Mexico, which is the State here, we have many national forests in the areas covered with red. At one point, New Mexico had 123 mills that were processing timber that were cut out of our national forests. So 20 or 30 years ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service said that we have to protect the spotted owl and logging is the problem. They killed 85 percent of the timber industry nationwide. They killed those jobs nationwide.

In New Mexico, of the 123 mills that we had processing timber at one point, we have closed 122 of them. So imagine these rural communities up in the mountains of a sparsely populated State, they have no economic basis now that the Forest Service has shut these mills down. By the way, about 3 years ago, they came out with a finding that logging was never the problem.

So economic devastation occurred in the areas where the national forest had stopped all logging for a lie that had come from the Fish and Wildlife Service. So people in the West are understandably irritated, they are angry, and they are mad because their way of life has disappeared in these logging communities. But it goes much further beyond that.

A couple of years ago, the Forest Service took a look at the grazing allotments in one of the forests and said: ``Oh, we have got to eliminate you 17 ranchers.''

We asked later if they would show us the science which said they have to get the people off. They showed me a picture of an orange, 5-gallon can turned upside-down in the forest and said: ``Look, the grass height is not high enough.''

I began to ridicule their orange-bucket science in public. It embarrassed them tremendously. Meanwhile, we asked the scientists at New Mexico State University to come and study the grazing and the height of the grass, and they said it is probably at historic heights.

So we got involved in the issue. All the ranchers were eventually reinstated into their allotments, but these are private property rights. The allotments are things that have been purchased and sometimes passed along from generation to generation.

Those private property rights, constitutional rights, were removed with no reason, with no understanding of what they are doing from a Forest Service that was arrogant with its power.

Again, you see the effect on our economy. New Mexico is one of the lowest economies in the U.S.'s 50 States. So to find the U.S. Government at odds with the jobs in the State in this rural area just does not make sense to most people. So you find this budding anger across the entire West because the same policies affect everyone out there.

Right now, we have a situation where one family has been fighting the U.S. Forest Service for their water rights. The court said the water rights belong to them. The Forest Service responded by putting a fence around the 23 acres. And they said: ``Well, it may be his water, but it is our 23 acres surrounding the water.''

The rancher went back to the courts. The courts said, over a period of time, he does not have a right to walk his cows on their 23 acres, but he does have the right to move the water from the 23 acres to his cows. The Forest Service responded by electrifying the fence.

Now, our office has been engaged for 12 years trying to get some reasonable understandings between the rancher and the Forest Service, but it, again, is this arrogance that is willing to drive one of the largest ranchers in that area out of business over something that is, to most people, not understandable.

We continue to analyze the effect, again, of these big red areas in our States. And at the end of the day, the most pressure is put on the Western schools. Now, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) has done a magnificent study showing that the schools in these States are 20 percent below in funding all of the States in the rest of the country.

So at the end of the day, the problem beyond the tax base, the problem beyond the jobs, the problem is in our schools that are starved for resources because we have no tax base on which to fund the schools and which to fund the local governments. So as you look at these footprints of the Federal Government ownership in the West, understand the trauma that it brings to us in our schools, in our jobs, and in our way of life.

It is time for the U.S. Government to change its policies. It is time for the U.S. Government to begin to deal with the fact that people need to raise families in rural States, they need the access to good schools, and we need to be able to access the land which they are currently curtailing at an amazing rate. So that is the perspective from New Mexico on the ownership of Federal lands.

Again, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) for his leadership on this issue. I thank him for the time that he has yielded to us on this particular subject matter. I would, again, state that we can do better and we must do better.

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