madam chairman , i move to strike the last word . 
i had planned to offer an amendment on this subject , but i will settle for a colloquy with the chairman of the subcommittee . 
before i start , let me just note for the record , i am glad to state to my constituents , i would have voted to cut the national endowment for the arts funding and , believe me , want that part of the record . 
madam chairman , the problem we have in the west is in terms of federal land . 
looking at my own state of arizona , 48.1 percent federal ownership . 
the state of nevada , 84.5 percent . 
utah , 57.4 percent . 
it is going up . 
the problem is , it is going up . 
you try to run a school system in a county where the federal government owns 80 , sometimes 90 percent , of the land in that county , it is tough to have enough taxable land to do so . 
the federal government has tried to make up for that by what is called pilt , or payment in lieu of taxes , where they compensate counties with a high incidence of federal land , but there is less of that than there is federal land certainly . 
i would argue here and have argued throughout this appropriation process that we need to cut federal land acquisition funding . 
we have successfully done that . 
the chairman of the subcommittee has been cooperative . 
we have seen a cut there . 
the problem is as soon as we get to the senate , it is negotiated upward once again , so that pilt funding is not nearly what was authorized , and federal land acquisition , we always get more than what we ask for . 
i would just respectfully ask the chairman if he will work within the conference to keep the number for federal land acquisition as low as possible . 
i understand that the $ 43.1 million , i believe , in the bill now is for land sales that are already in the works . 
that is understandable . 
but if we could please insist that that not go up any higher . 
as we go up and acquire more federal land , we simply make the problem worse . 
we exacerbate the problem of pilt funding that is too low and federal land acquisition , which is too high . 
