Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 478 and S. 789 En Bloc
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. 478, would direct the Secretary of the Interior to take 55.3 acres of land owned by the Gila River Indian Community into trust.
The Gila River Indian Community Reservation is already 583 square miles, with a population of 11,000. The Gila River Indian Community already owns this land, so why we need to take more land into trust and have the Federal Government more involved in the management of the land is not immediately obvious or apparent to me. The answer is not at all clear as to why it needs to be in trust.
Trust land responsibilities for the Federal Government are significant and before we expand the size of our trust lands, we have to have an understanding of what we are doing and the actual need to do it
Proponents of this legislation have claimed that the Tribe has a unique history with this particular plot of land--this particular 55.3 acres of land--adjacent to the trust land. But from the history shown, the Tribe's interaction with the land is mostly that they have had friendly neighbors with whom they have traded goods.
As many of my colleagues are aware, I have great concerns that I have quite consistently expressed with further expanding the Federal Government's management or involvement in public lands, including trust lands.
Nevertheless, I have been engaging in negotiations, and I have made a number of good-faith efforts to develop a possible path forward--one in which the amount of acreage owned or held in trust by the Federal Government would not grow, while taking this land into trust for the Gila River Indian Community. While I continue to negotiate a path forward, I am not inclined to abandon this concern. This is a negotiation that has been in progress.
That said, with respect to the part of the request dealing specifically with S. 789, the RESPECT Act, I am willing to let that go.
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Mr. LEE. I fully am amenable to that, with the RESPECT Act
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