Members have rightfully noted that there's very little time left between now and the beginning of this proposed travel. I would just like to add that, should the committee agree this evening that they would like to travel and they would like to see a budget, we could put one together in time for tomorrow's meeting, but we would need more specific details about the cities the committee would like to visit. When I read this on the indigenous communities, perhaps the committee could specify an indigenous community and maybe some ideas about how we balance rural and urban, given what cities the committee wants to go to.
If this budget gets adopted by the committee tomorrow and is then approved by the SBLI, say tomorrow afternoon, we won't get House authorization probably until Wednesday, which only leaves us two to three business days to set up these meetings, which is going to be a challenge. We have a formidable team who's ready to put this together; however, there are some things that are going to be out of our control such as flights, hotel availability, and meeting room availability in some of the cities. There's going to be very little flexibility and very little time to adjust if we run into issues with the logistics.
A second concern that I have is that we don't yet have a witness list for any of these cities, or any of the cities that will be proposed, so it may be a challenge to find witnesses who are available and who will be adequately prepared to appear before the committee in those various cities. If the committee's desire is to travel, I would hope that we could get those names as quickly as possible so that we could communicate with those individuals and try to make sure that they're available for the committee. My fear is that we'll go to all the trouble, we'll set up the meetings, we'll travel, and then we won't have all the witnesses that the committee wants to see in those locations.