Now, the way I understand the hearing, I will have a few questions. Then Senator Bingaman is next. Senator Thomas is next. Senator Johnson is next, Senator Campbell, and then Senator Craig. We are doing this, Senator Craig, not on seniority but on time of arrival. When I am finished, I am going to leave for a little while and Senator Craig has willingly agreed to be chairman for a while.

Madam Secretary, I have about four areas to discuss with you. I am going to be as brief as I can, and then I am going to submit a whole series of questions on these very same issues.

First, I am going to talk about an issue in New Mexico. Because it is unique, I think it should be of interest to you. We have a Rio Grande River, which is our only significant river. It was called Rio Grande because Rio Grande in the Spanish language is not really Rio Grande. It is Rio Grande, meaning it was the big river as explorers approached the Southwest. Well, it is not very big anymore and it runs dry in its lower regions many, many times in many parts of the year and has historically.

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But there lives in that river a little minnow. The minnow, for the most part, is not where the water is, which is most unique. It is at the end of the river in sand and low water so that the river must run almost its entire length to reach the minnow. There is a vote at 11 o'clock, so we will handle that as we see best here.

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So what we have been doing over the years is trying to establish a biological working plan that feeds enough water into those minnow ponds. I can tell you, while this is not an issue that should be at your level, if you were from that State, it would be at your level. We have now had to transfer thousands of acre feet of water from our reservoirs to try to make the water run all the way down there.

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Now, I have submitted on behalf of a governor of an Indian tribe that abuts on this river and myself a request to the Bureau of Reclamation, Corps of Engineers, and Fish and Wildlife Service that they do something unique. That they bring the minnow to the water, instead of the water to minnow because this stream upstream has water all the time. We have suggested that alongside of it on Indian land, with their permission, we establish a sanctuary and that the minnows be put in the sanctuary. The minnow will then be able to live there without us having to move the river all these hundreds of miles to get to those lower river ponds.

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Now, Madam Secretary, I just want you to know that there is no more important issue to the people that live on that river. That is Albuquerque, that is all the communities along that river, and almost all the middle New Mexico agriculture that there is. They would cheer if there was some way to protect the minnow with a minimum waste of water.

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Now, I know that the technical people do not like innovation and I know they are not going to like this, but I would ask you if you would make sure that it is being given appropriate attention and that it gets up to your office before they tell us that we cannot do it. I am willing to ask my Senators to alter the law if something has to be done because I see no way of this being anything but a plus. Okay?

Secretary NORTON. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, it is my understanding that there is an analysis underway.

The CHAIRMAN. There is.

Secretary NORTON. I will be happy to take a closer look at that. The CHAIRMAN. I appreciate it.

Secretary NORTON. I appreciate your ideas.

The CHAIRMAN. I think if you would tell them that this is something that deserves serious attention and you do not want them to waste so much time, that would be enough for me.

Now I want to talk about Healthy Forests for just a minute. The Forest Service held a meeting with all of its forest supervisors and spent a great deal of time explaining the administration's expectations on implementation of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act.

Now, Madam Secretary, that is not your Department. That is Agriculture. What has your Department, the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Land Management done to inform your field managers as to the Secretary's expectations for implementing this important legislation? Have you established targets for each of your State directors and managers, and if you have, how many acres do you expect to accomplish in fiscal year 2004?

Secretary NORTON. That is something where we have a lot of attention focused on exactly how much fuels treatment is taking place. It is something that we did not have when I took office, but we now have a good system for tracking that. We anticipate 1.1 million acres for 2004. If you look at both Interior and Forest Service, that will be 3.7 million acres.

The CHAIRMAN. But what I want to know is if one of these Senators goes to their home State and there is a field director and they go up and ask them, we do not want them to tell us, well, we have not been told what the plan is for our State, for the State we are in. We go up the road and talk to the Forest Service and they will tell us they have got the plan. All I am saying is would you please be sure that in many States where the BLM land is as important as the Forest Service land in this regard, they know what they are doing with as much certainty and workability with the constituents as the Forest Service.

Secretary NORTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I can assure you we have had a lot of training that has been done. We have guidance that has gone out. I have seen guidance as it has gone out on a number of different topics. I have personally visited sites. I was just at one in Nevada a few days ago. So we are really getting the word out to people in the field that this is very important.

The CHAIRMAN. Now, with reference to this but on a little bit of a side issue, New Mexico has literally millions of piñon junipers. Thousands upon thousands of them are dying. I would like you to provide us with, if you do not have one, would you go to work on some kind of strategic plan for treating these areas of mortality as soon as practicable? Can you do that for us?

Secretary NORTON. I would be happy to look into that and see what our status is on that.

The CHAIRMAN. I would also mention to you that in the same realm there are thousands of acres of private and State land that are suffering what we would call catastrophic mortality. Are there

any programs in the Department that they can look to for help or that we can work together with the private sector on? If there are not, I would just like an answer. If there are, what are they? If you have some way of telling us that there could be if we would do something, then we would like that kind of response.

Secretary NORTON. We would be happy to provide that information. For the most part, we are trying to work from the bottom up on our fuels treatments and give the opportunity for communities to be involved in our planning process since we really want to get the communities that have those fire dangers involved.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, ma'am. I have two questions left. Then I will yield to Senator Bingaman. I have some detailed questions about oil and gas issues and leases, but I just want to ask you a couple of general ones.

We have continually attempted to say to you and your Department heads that have charge of public lands wherein there might be or there is oil and/or gas that we are not trying to change any laws. We continue to hear from our constituents that the process of permitting is still very slow. They tell us that when we say we are running out of natural gas. And we are. But they tell us we could produce a lot more, but it is taking too long.

Now, ma'am, I want to know in all honesty, forgetting about the budget-if you want to tell it to us privately, fine do you have enough people to do this job or not? And do you have enough people that are trained or trainable to do this job?

And secondly, have you tried anything new to make this job more workable?

We have all been talking about changing the law so there would be centers for perfecting the permits so you will not go one place for the initial permit, another place for the rest, but do it all in one or two or three centers. In fact, we had in the energy bill three or five centers I think, Senator Bingaman.

Could you just address generally this issue? Frankly, we are going to hold you to this in terms of who is responsible for the delays.

Secretary NORTON. We have been looking at that issue with a great deal of attention because we have also been hearing concerns about that.

First of all, we are improving the process that we have been using. That improvement has not been completed. We are still doing some additional analysis about how to do improvements. But, for example, I have heard of situations in the past where we had two different wells being drilled from the same pad and yet they did separate environmental assessments for each of those. That does not make sense.

We are now consolidating things so that we work on a geographic area basis and look more broadly doing one set of analyses and consultations in order to clear more of the applications at the same time. So we are trying to work smarter.

We also have increased staff in some of the areas that have the highest number of applications going forward.

There are a number of areas where we had to do a land use plan or other environmental analysis, a major document and study, before we could go forward with processing individual applications.

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For example, in the Powder River area of Wyoming, I believe we have processed now 600 applications for permits to drill since October. So we are moving forward in a number of areas.

Overall in the last 3 years, we have processed over 10,000 applications for permits to drill, and the BLM has established the goal of a 35-day time period for processing an application. It was 58 days in fiscal year 2002.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, I just want to say a goal is one thing, and the achievement is another. So it will be interesting to me if you have a goal, but if you would give us some idea of what it really is. You might have a goal of 38, but it still may be 48. If you could have somebody do a survey and tell us, it would make me feel a lot better because they are still telling me that the delays are not 38 days. Thank you very much.

Senator Bingaman will question the Secretary and we will go vote and return shortly. Thank you, Senator Bingaman.

Senator BINGAMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I appreciate, Madam Secretary, your statement that you will look into this problem of lack of responsiveness.

Let me mention one other issue that I also mentioned in my opening statement and that is these budget justification documents. In the case of the other agencies that I am familiar with, we get these at the same time we get the President's budget. Now, we got them from the Bureau of Reclamation. We got theirs. That is the one I am holding right here. We have still not received budget justification documents from the Park Service, from the BLM, from the Wildlife Service. We get those from the Department of Energy which comes before this committee. We get those for all the other agencies that I have dealings with.

Could you also look into that problem and figure out how we can get these documents in a timely manner?

Secretary NORTON. I would be happy to look into that, and let me ask John Trezise who is our Director of Budget. I apologize I had failed to introduce him. Let me ask him to reply.

Mr. TREZISE. Senator, I can only apologize that all the justifications are not here yet. We have been working very, very hard with the bureaus and the Office of Management and Budget to get them completed. The Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service justifications I believe will be going to the printer.

The CHAIRMAN. I can just barely heard you. Maybe you could pull that up or push the button or something.

Mr. TREZISE. The Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service justifications will be going to the printer very shortly.

The challenge we face is that we have such a broad multitude of programs. We have more accounts than any other domestic agency. The justifications in total, when they are published in the hearing record of the House Appropriations Committee, run to 4,000 pages. It is a very difficult task. It has to be accomplished in a short period of time. We are trying to do better.

Senator BINGAMAN. My impression is that previous administrations have done this. I am informed by the committee that the norm is for us to get these. It is just the last couple of years we have not.

Mr. TREZISE. Senator, I do not believe that is the case. This is my 13th or 14th budget, and I think that this has been a consistent problem that we have had going back as long as I have been involved in this process.

Senator BINGAMAN. Well, I hope you can get it resolved some way or other because it makes it difficult for us to meaningfully question you about the budget if we do not know what the justifications are at the time we have these hearings.

Let me ask on the Middle Rio Grande. Obviously, this is of concern to the Department. I have a copy of your Water 2025 and it is listed with Klamath Basin as a major problem area. I am concerned that the reclamation 2005 budget proposes to cut $9.5 million from the Middle Rio Grande which leaves only $5 million for ESA compliance efforts there. This is in drastic contrast or significant contrast to Klamath Basin where the budget proposes $67 million among the various Interior agencies to address the water issues there. Both of these areas are listed in Water 2025 as high priorities, and the estimate I have seen from your own Department says that to comply with the 2003 biological opinion, which you have agreed to comply with, it is going to cost $233 million.

So how do we get from here to there if we are going to cut the budget by $9.5 million?

Secretary NORTON. As it currently stands, we have funding in the Bureau of Reclamation that should be sufficient to comply with the biological opinion for this coming year. We include costs of leasing water and other funds. There certainly is an eligibility to use some of our other funding for the Middle Rio Grande area. I have talked with the mayor of Albuquerque about some of these activities. I have been involved in getting briefings on this. So this is something that we see as a high priority.

Senator BINGAMAN. Well, I will be amazed if you can comply with that biological opinion with the amount of money you have asked for, but we will continue to monitor that.

Let me ask also, in the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, there is a requirement that no less than 40 percent of the expenditures from the Land and Water Conservation Fund each year be used for Federal purposes that are defined as Federal land acquisitions. Now, your budget proposes considerably less than that for Federal land acquisitions. Am I missing something here? Is this just an ignoring of the legal requirement? Am I misreading the legal requirement? What is your view on that?

Secretary NORTON. Congress has over time funded a number of different programs out of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. As we look at the question of land acquisition generally, with the overall goal being making sure that we are taking care of natural resources, protecting habitat, and improving the land, we find that through our grant programs, for example, we can restore many acres of land for the cost of purchasing the land. In essence, when you look at protecting land by acquisition, we have to pay the acquisition price and then we have to pay whatever it takes to re