Fix Our Forests Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TIFFANY. Mr. Chair, I rise today in support of Chairman Westerman's bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act.

This bill is the culmination of the House Committee on Natural Resources' efforts this Congress to advance innovative solutions to increase the pace and scale of forest management, protect vulnerable communities from catastrophic wildfires, and restore health and resiliency to our Nation's ailing forests and Federal lands.

Addressing the health of our forests and rangelands is not an issue that will be solved by simply throwing more dollars at it. We need substantive changes in our land management practices.

Undermining active forest management has caused damage to our Nation's forests and Federal lands, and we have seen the consequences of this mismanagement out West, resulting in year after year of bad wildfire seasons.

We can act right now to reverse this trend, and that starts with passing this bill.

This bill contains streamlined tools to expedite bureaucratic environmental reviews, ending frivolous litigation that delays important projects, expanding Good Neighbor Authority, prioritizing high-risk forests, and a fix to the Cottonwood decision, which is responsible for doubling the cost of some projects.

It also includes my bill, the ACRES Act, which requires land managers to produce yearly hazardous fuels reduction reports based on the actual number of acres that they treated, and I will note that this proposal already passed the House with robust bipartisan support.

The provisions included in this bill will lead to better management, which in turn, will result in better outcomes for our land managers and our local communities with fewer wildfires and a cleaner environment.

To one of the comments, Mr. Chair, that was shared previously about the firefighter problem we have and the danger they are being put in, the number one thing we can do to protect firefighters' health and life is to manage our forests.

Take a look at this chart here to my right where you see forest management. The amount of wood that is being harvested, all from our Federal forests, steadily declined since the 1980s.

What happened with wildfires? They increased significantly. There is a direct correlation. Manage our forests, take timber off from it, and we will not have these wildfires as we have seen since 1988.

I thank the chairman, Mr. Westerman, for his tireless work on this in the Natural Resources Committee, which I sit on, and I urge passage of this bill.

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