[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 4506]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




             KEEPING OUR COMMITMENTS TO OUR RURAL COUNTIES

  (Mr. WALDEN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. WALDEN. Mr. Speaker, we have a great opportunity before us today 
to not only provide certainty for healthcare providers and seniors by 
repealing the flawed SGR for Medicare, but also to fund rural schools 
and rural forested counties. So I commend my colleagues for their work 
on this with me.
  Included in this legislation is 2 years' worth of funding for the 
Secure Rural Schools program. Now, this is like one of those cans of 
Fix-A-Flat, if you will. It is an emergency repair on the side of the 
road to solve a short-term problem, when what we really need is a 
permanent fix for our forested counties. But this is an emergency, and 
what we are doing here today is providing that lifeline to our 
schoolchildren in the classrooms in our rural counties that are 
forested under Federal land and making sure that our local law 
enforcement folks have the resources they need and, in my own State of 
Oregon, protecting some counties from actually going bankrupt because 
of lack of management and lack of activity on our Federal lands.
  So I remain fully committed to working on forestry legislation that 
puts people back to work in the woods, reduces the threat of wildfire, 
and produces the revenue to allow for self-sustaining counties and the 
people in them. I just hope this time with a new Senate we will be able 
to move forward.

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