Accurately Counting Risk Elimination Solutions Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TIFFANY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for his support throughout the process in regard to this bill.

There is very little that I can add to what the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee has laid out in his opening remarks in regard to the need for the ACRES Act. One of the few things I can add is a picture.

The picture to my right here shows the need for this bill. When the amount of acres that are being treated are not counted accurately, we end up with a situation where those acres that should be treated don't get treated. This is the Grizzly Flats fire a couple years ago that wiped out that community. The Forest Service knew that it was time that these treatments needed to be put in place, and they weren't, and a community was destroyed out in the great State of California.

This bill will bring transparency to the misleading and inaccurate way hazardous fuels treatments are reported. Decades of mismanagement of our Federal lands have left our forests overstocked and created tinderbox conditions.

We have long known the reported pace and scale of forest management has been insufficient to truly address our forest health crisis. There is a better way to manage our public lands, and that starts with holding our Federal land management agencies accountable by requiring accurate reporting on the effectiveness of their work in fuel reduction.

According to troubling reports, the situation is even worse than we have been led to believe, as agencies have been overstating their treatments by over 20 percent.

Accurate reporting is necessary to broadly track the progress made on our larger wildfire mitigation targets, as well as individual projects.

The ACRES Act is a simple solution to hold our Federal agencies accountable to see the actual work they are doing to reduce the enormous risk of wildfire.

American taxpayers deserve to know they are getting what they paid for. This bill is one of the steps needed to help ensure that happens.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes.''

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source