00:00Thank you very much. My time's expired. Senator Heinrich. Thank you. Welcome
00:05Secretary. I want to continue on this same vein and when will we know which
00:13lands are being considered for for land sales and also I want to ask you if you
00:22have well let's just start with that for so that we can have a public process
00:27here so that the public can understand really what's at stake and so we can get
00:31beyond the the the current dynamic of what people are imagining but actually
00:37understanding what lands you're talking about in this process. Yes thank you
00:44ranking chairman or ranking member on the right now we're at a proposal stage and
00:49and so we've taken a look as I've just described at a macro level we've tried to
00:53take a look and say we have we have taken a look how many acres do we have that
00:58might be something that could be of of high value for an alternative use say
01:03like housing that has low value for recreation mineral resources etc and
01:09those typically are things that are directly adjacent to addition you know a
01:13existing and fast-growing population centers so that was our first target and
01:18and and of course those are occurring most likely in the states that I've
01:22described as the the three states that have the highest percentage of federal
01:26land or the four Idaho Alaska Utah and Nevada have got the highest percentage of
01:30federal land and are also have got fast-growing communities that are bumping
01:35up against low value federal land. I think to make sure that we're we're
01:41dealing with lands that are as you describe one of the most important things
01:44will be to have a transparent and public process will you hold public meetings
01:50before offering those potential lands up for sale? Yeah absolutely and I want to
01:56reassure members here and the public that there's you know there won't be an acre
02:01of of our any of our 63 national parks that are considered up for sale I mean this is
02:07not about our most sacred and beautiful places this is often about like I said you
02:12know barren land next to highways with existing billboards that have no
02:17recreational value but you know would represent do represent a constraint in
02:21some cases cities are leapfrogging their infrastructure beyond the federal land
02:25creating additional infrastructure costs for those cities and of course when we
02:29can do infill that helps creates a great revenue opportunity for us to help
02:35whether it's deferred maintenance new recreational opportunities are
02:38reducing the deficit but also helps those cities operate more efficiently. You
02:43talked about the southern Nevada legislation but there's actually a
02:46federal program that's available to every single state for the BLM to utilize and
02:52that's the federal land transaction facilitation act. The the funds that get
02:59generated from public lands that get sold under that legislation go to
03:04recreation they go to access they go to conservation. We're currently developing
03:09some housing in New Mexico using that framework. Is that a framework that you
03:13have looked at for for this process? I certainly want to look at all the models
03:20that we have today that are already working and learn from them to as we go
03:25forward to make sure that we're using the best practices that we've identified.
03:29Obviously the the advantage of FLIPFA over the southern Nevada was designed for a
03:35specific county and so it's kind of a one-off. I would urge you to look at
03:40FLIPFA in part because it's it's something that is available to you now. It's proven
03:45we've used it in New Mexico several times and it's available west wide. When you were
03:52before the Senate Appropriations Committee we talked about this plan to
03:56potentially downsize the National Park system by transferring some sites out
04:01of federal management to the states and and I sent you a follow-up letter on
04:07that. I very much appreciate that you replied to my letter but what your reply
04:11did not include is just what sites might these be. Where are you in that process
04:16because we're you know we're several months now from the next budget year and
04:21if this is going to be a serious proposal that the American people deserve
04:26to understand what's potentially on the list. Yes and I I want to go back to your
04:34opening remarks that that suggested that that we would need to be disposing of
04:43hundreds and hundreds of these smaller park units to make up some kind of budget
04:47deficit I just would say having had an opportunity to dig into the park service
04:52budget I don't think that's the case I think we've got a tremendous amount of
04:56overhead that we're operating I mean across the federal government in general
05:00across interior in general and I think that as I learned as governor of North
05:05Dakota when we were able to reduce spending by 27 percent there was a lot of
05:10anxiety when we had to do that but we were able to do that and not we
05:14actually increased the money that went to our parks we created a new state park in
05:18North Dakota even after reducing budgets because we took cost out of the
05:23I call the overhead that was occurring in the capital. That's precisely why we need
05:27a plan right so that we're not arguing over hypotheticals that we're arguing over
05:31real numbers so given the fact that this is this is a budget year that we have to
05:36deal with now as the Congress I want to understand what those real impacts are what
05:42the sites are that are being considered is is that a list or a plan that you can
05:47get us you know in in a week in a month certainly not in a week because part of
05:54one of the challenges we're having on even if we have a proposal like this one of
05:59the things I found that's a I would say really almost staggering from an
06:06operational standpoint is that the the systems that we have make it almost
06:10impossible to get information you know I hear regularly about you know we've got 330 million
06:16people visiting parks those aren't 330 million different people those are visitor days but
06:21then we often don't even have the data to find out are those people that live in the
06:25local community are the international visitors how often I mean if you're going to dispose of of
06:30something like the knife river Indian village in North Dakota that I think only you know may
06:34have less than a thousand visitors in an entire season and yet we've got a park
06:38superintendent and other people there and federal dollars and that would fit in my
06:43own state nicely into our state historic society framework which could and take
06:50advantage of local resources to manage it you know our target would be to look at the
06:55places that have very low visitation but even if you would ask a question like hey
06:58please give me the visitation by each of these over 400 sites that they know
07:03there's numbers that aren't they're not good data on that so it's going to be
07:06difficult to make in great decisions quickly we just have to try to create the
07:12data framework because I would want to have any decisions we make be data driven
07:16and and that's going to make it more difficult to identify how we can do things
07:21that make sense from a budget standpoint
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