Jay Obernolte

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of my bill, H.R. 3925,

the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation Land Exchange Act.

For nearly a decade, the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation has worked with the U.S. Forest Service to complete a land exchange in San Bernardino County.

The San Manuel Reservation is surrounded by Federal lands and the communities of San Bernardino and Highland, leaving the Nation with limited space to meet its housing, infrastructure, and cultural needs.

H.R. 3925 would complete an exchange of approximately 1,500 acres of Forest Service land for an equivalent amount already owned by the Nation. Much of the land being provided by the Nation was acquired specifically to facilitate this exchange at the request of the Forest Service.

Completing this exchange will create a more contiguous land base, reduce checkerboard ownership, and improve land management for both the Nation and the Forest Service.

This legislation also protects the historic Arrowhead landmark, a site of significant cultural importance to the Yuhaaviatam people and a well-known symbol throughout the San Bernardino Valley.

This exchange will also support better wildfire preparation and land management in an area that faces significant wildfire risk. The Nation has already made substantial investments in fire protection and emergency response at the edge of the San Bernardino National Forest.

Mr. Speaker, after years of work and unfortunate delay, congressional action is needed to finally complete this process. This is a straightforward measure that respects Tribal sovereignty, protects important cultural resources, and improves land management in my district.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 3925.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of the ALERT Act. The collision last year at DCA was a terrible tragedy, and like most aviation tragedies, it was 100 percent preventable.

The NTSB earlier this year released a comprehensive report analyzing the accident. What it discovered, like most aviation accidents, is that there was a whole chain of events that occurred. Any one of those links could have been interrupted and prevented the accident.

The NTSB made a number of different recommendations on what can be done to improve the situation, and this bill implements those recommendations. This is far beyond just the paths that helicopters and aircraft take, which need to be separated. It goes to things like the staffing of air traffic control towers, the technology behind collision avoidance systems, military training routes and the ways that those are communicated, and a host of different things that, implemented together, will ensure that these types of accidents do not happen in the future.

Madam Speaker, I am so proud to be a cosponsor of this bill. I thank my friend and fellow pilot, Chairman Graves, for his tireless advocacy in seeing this through to fruition. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in reluctant opposition to the ROTOR Act.

This bill is a well-intentioned response to the horrific airline accident last year at DCA. In the months since the accident, it has become clear that the accident would have been prevented had the helicopter that was involved in the collision been broadcasting its position and its speed through the ADS-B Out system.

This bill would indeed fix that. However, this bill imposes a costly mandate that every aircraft within the system implement a technology called ADS-B In.

Mr. Speaker, most of the aircraft that would be affected by this bill, those with a takeoff weight of over 12,500 pounds, already have superior technology for collision avoidance called TCAS II.

Mr. Speaker, this is technology that works at all airports. At most of the general aviation airports in my district, ADS-B Out will not work near the ground, Mr. Speaker, because you have to be receiving air traffic control signals for it to work. TCAS II works at all of those airports.

Moreover, since the ROTOR Act was introduced months ago before the NTSB report was released, it does not implement many of the recommendations in that report.

Chairman Graves has a far superior bill called the ALERT Act that addresses all 50 of those recommendations.

Mr. Speaker, I urge us to reject the ROTOR Act today and to quickly pass the ALERT Act, conference those changes with the Senate, and get it on the President's desk for signature.