mr. speaker , i yield myself such time as i may consume . 
i appreciate the comments from the gentleman from massachusetts ( mr. mcgovern ) xz4002630 , and i commend the gentleman for the one statement he asked us all to do which is to go to our state and local leaders and find out what their priorities happen to be . 
i would like to do something unique so far in today 's debate and talk about something that is actually in the bill , and something about which we will be debating later , and preface it with the comment of why , when we try to prioritize , should we spend new taxpayer money for new recreation areas and programs when some of the existing programs , long-time recognized , long time in the bill , are not totally and fully funded . 
if i could , mr. speaker , i come from a western state that has a great deal of federal land . 
in fact , 67 percent of my state is owned by the federal government . 
if we add military lands on top of that , it is almost 80 percent owned by the federal government . 
and , unfortunately , my state is not the worst situation . 
there are states that have more of their land owned by the federal government . 
oftentimes i have members come to the floor and say these lands belong to all of us , but the cost of maintaining those lands is not borne by all of us ; it is borne by the citizens who happen to reside within those particular states . 
now i am an old teacher , and as i look at the situation of education , i find a unique phenomenon that the area of this country in which education funding is growing the slowest , the area of this country where the classrooms are the largest , the area of this country where the student population is increasing the fastest , and the area of this country where state and local commitment in tax base is being paid by their citizens all happen to be found in the 13 states of the west . 
and the common denominator for all is the amount of public lands that happen to be in these particular states . 
those members east of the rocky mountains sometimes do not comprehend the concept because there is very little of your land owned by the federal government , and you can maximize the amount of input , but you can not do it in the west . 
one of my counties has an area known as the black box , something that no one in utah would ever try to raft down . 
one of our good constituent friends from another state decided to come and raft in the area of the black box ; and , unfortunately , he lost his life doing it . 
the problem is my county of emery had to expend its resources and have their rescue team risk their lives to retrieve the body . 
all of the money that was budgeted for that year 's critical rescue missions was expended on that one individual entering from the east using all of these public lands . 
all of the cost of that was borne by the citizens of that particular county , which means once again these lands belong to all of us , but the expense attached to these lands do not belong to all of us . 
there is a program that we have long had called `` payment in lieu of taxes , '' which recognizes the burden placed upon the west and the burden that should be funded . 
from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s , virtually no new money was placed in this program . 
it was flat funding for almost that whole period of time . 
this congress put $ 1.4 million of new money into the burgeoning problem of trying to pay for the federal lands in the west . 
under the direction of the gentleman from north carolina this last year , this program , traditionally run through the bureau of land management , was taken over by the department of the interior with the idea of prioritizing it . 
they did not . 
instead of prioritizing this program , they recommended a cut in this program and increased funding to the administrative overhead of the department of the interior . 
i commend the gentleman from north carolina ( chairman taylor ) for recognizing the unfairness of this and by increasing the payment in lieu of taxes to last year 's level plus $ 3 million , but it is still not close to full funding . 
i am confident and hopeful that we will discuss that particular issue because it is a well-established program . 
it is not new , and we should be funding those well-established programs fully before we launch into new endeavors . 
i commend the gentleman from north carolina ( chairman taylor ) for zeroing out the land acquisition budget except for necessary administration costs because it comes up with the same policy : we do not start buying new land until we fully fund those lands that we already own . 
we have an opportunity of expanding this in conference . 
this is one of the issues in this free-flowing open rule that we will be discussing later on . 
this is an issue where i commend the chairman for doing what he has done in this bill and urge him to continue on , because the citizens of the west , the kids in the west , the education system of the west have been harmed too long by policies that all of us in congress for over 30 years have been implementing . 
it is an unfairness that must be dealt with . 
i commend the gentleman from north carolina ( chairman taylor ) and the committee for moving the first step forward . 
but i hope that we can look at other amendments as this debate goes forward that would look at funding the programs we already have that have been there for many years that desperately need to be fully funded before we launch into others , and that is specifically what an appropriations process should do . 
it should prioritize our needs . 
once again , we can go back to the concept that we can not fund everything , but what we fund , we should fund well . 
mr. speaker , i reserve the balance of my time . 
