Call to End Fire Borrowing

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, last year more acreage in our forests burned than ever before. I know the Presiding Officer understands what this has been like in the West over the last few years. Senator Crapo and I have dedicated something like 5 years of our professional lives to coming up with practical approaches to deal with this mushrooming problem. There are a whole host of issues that go into making a sensible forestry policy to make sure that we can protect our treasures in the West, have jobs in the woods that are sustainable, and keep our forests healthy.

In order to do that, one of the most important reforms that are necessary is the one that Senator Crapo and I have been working on. I really began on this before I was the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Senator Crapo and I literally have teamed up now for half a decade to end a particularly inefficient and harmful economic and environmental policy that we call fire borrowing. Fire borrowing takes place when Congress fails to budget enough money to fight wildfires, forcing agencies to raid their other accounts, including accounts to prevent wildfires.

Obviously, there may be some listening in who don't represent western communities. But what Senator Crapo and I have tried to convey to our colleagues is that fire borrowing doesn't just threaten fire prevention and suppression. It is quicksand that is dragging down all of the programs at the Forest Service: timber sales, stream restoration, trail maintenance, recreation, and many more.

So Senator Crapo and I said that this was too important to have yet another issue that gets thrown around, batted around like another bit of cannon fodder for partisan kind of drills. We have put together legislation with 21 cosponsors in the Senate and 145 in the House to end fire borrowing. Our legislation is supported by a coalition of more than 250 groups of anglers, sportsmen, environmentalists, and timber companies. It is pretty hard to get more than a handful of people to agree on much of anything here in Washington, DC. What Senator Crapo and I have been talking about now has more than 250 organizations behind it.

Despite the overwhelming support for this effort, the bill has been stuck. Tonight what Senator Crapo and I are going to talk about is how we can work together with our colleagues to unstick this and to get it done. We felt that all along we had been doing what it took to make this happen. We talked to our colleagues of both parties. We negotiated. We talked to House Members. We talked to Senate offices. We talked to the administration. We talked to timber and environmental people. All we said is that it makes sense, even though there are a whole host of changes that you can pursue for a sensible fire policy to end fire borrowing for good, to end the erosion of the Forest Service budget, and to start focusing on prevention. Wouldn't it make more sense to concentrate on prevention, going in there and thinning out the forests and using sensible fire prevention strategies rather than not to do the prevention and have the forests get hot and dry? Then we have lightning strikes in our part of the world. All of a sudden you have an inferno on your hands, and they don't have enough money to put all these fires out. So you borrow from the prevention fund and the problem gets worse.

What Senator Crapo and I said is that we will work with all of the budget authorities. We were very much involved with Chairman Enzi in this. We could come up with some budget process issues that would be acceptable here in the Senate and also to our colleagues in the House.

There was a colloquy last week among the chairs of the Energy, Budget, and Agriculture Committees that indicated that they very much want a resolution of the issue. I am pleased that they are interested in hearings and working on legislation and moving in February and March. I felt that this was a promising start to the year because that is what Senator Crapo and I were after last July when we got a great many Senators together and we said that we were going to try to get this worked out so that it could have been done last fall. We all said that we were going to get together and get this resolved.

Obviously, for a variety of reasons it didn't happen. But I think what we heard last week strikes me as a beginning to finally getting this unstuck, and I have been so appreciative of working with the Senator on this now for something like 5 years. I would be interested in the Senator's reaction with respect to this situation.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Idaho, and in wrapping this up I wish to convey what the bottom line really is here.

Senator Crapo and I do not want to be back on the floor of the U.S. Senate in the winter of 2017 once again talking about how something got stuck or somebody didn't agree with somebody on one small aspect of this, and as a result fire borrowing is still in place. What Senator Crapo and I are saying is we want to work with all sides. It is going to have to be bipartisan and it is going to have to be bicameral. Those are probably the most important words in this whole discussion. It is going to have to be bipartisan and it is going to have to be bicameral.

We have lots of committees involved. We have the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that I am on and the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, and the Budget Committee that both of us have been on. We have lots of committees in the Senate, and we have partners in the House who have also played a meaningful role.

I would like to think that Senator Crapo and I were able to move that bipartisan, bicameral process a fair way down the road at the end of last year, but what we are saying is: Let's now vow, as a body and working with our colleagues, to make sure we are not back here in the winter of 2017 after yet another horrendous fire season and once again saying: You know, this Forest Service practice is a textbook case of inefficiency, and we are explaining what fire borrowing is and how it does so much damage in the forest and to forest health.

This is about the betterment of rural resource-dependent communities, especially in the West and around the country. Senator Crapo and I have worked together on other past efforts, such as the secure rural schools legislation and the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. We were both involved in those efforts and they were, in fact, bipartisan and bicameral.

Tonight our hope is, as a result of this discussion and what we heard on the floor of the Senate last week, that in fact after more than 5 years of effort on this issue, that this time the Congress, on both sides of the Capitol, will come together and will work with the administration. They indicated support for what we were doing last year and will indicate support early on for efforts that are bipartisan and bicameral. The sooner we can get on with that, the better. That is why it is good news that the committees will be starting hearings and legislative consideration shortly, and we look forward to working with our colleagues.

I yield at this time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source