Eugene weekly., July 16, 2015, Page 7, Image 7

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CONGRESS FIRES UP DEBATE
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As fire season heats up in Oregon and across the West, debates over logging and for-
estry are staying hot in Congress. The House just passed HR 2647, the Resilient Federal
Forests Act of 2015, and Congressman Peter DeFazio is one of the Democrats who voted
in favor of the bill.
HR 2647 deals with forest management, logging, firefighting and other issues on fed-
eral public lands. In his floor speech, DeFazio said he didn’t see the bill as “perfect,” but
he tells EW that “you can choose between doing nothing and moving forward with some-
thing that has some good provisions and some that are not good.”
The provisions DeFazio takes issue with include categorical exclusions on salvage log-
ging projects up to 5,000 acres and making it harder for people with a legitimate grievance
against a federal land agency to sue, by forcing them to put up a bond covering some of
the government’s litigation costs.
DeFazio says if the legislation progresses he will work with the Senate to change some
of these aspects of the bill.
He says this bill would end “fire bor-
rowing,” something he has long sought to
stop. Fire borrowing means that every year,
after federal land managers run out of con-
gressionally approved money to fight fires,
they dip into funds for things like road
maintenance, recreation and trails, result-
ing in hikes on trails that look like “pick-
up sticks” and the cancelation of forestry
projects.
Andy Stahl of Forest Service Employ-
ees for Environmental Ethics says, citing
— C O N G R E S S M A N P E T E R D E FA Z I O
DeFazio’s floor speech, “Peter says he
voted for this horrible bill because ‘our na-
tional forests are burning up at an alarming
rate.’” But, according to Stahl, that’s “wrong, wrong, wrong. National forests are burning
at a much-reduced rate this year.”
The bill would allow the federal government to treat wildfires similarly to other natural
disasters, like hurricanes, and it would permit agencies to request emergency money from
the Federal Emergency Management Agency when their fire budget is depleted.
Stahl continues: “Making the Forest Service unaccountable to the American people,
as this bill would do, won’t reduce wildfires. And giving the Forest Service another blank
check to waste money fighting fires ineffectively will mean less money for thinning and
the things Peter would like to see done in the woods. This was not Peter’s finest hour.”
Also, the bill would specifically affect Oregon’s federal forests in that it calls for the
Bureau of Land Management to conduct further studies on a proposed management plan
for Western Oregon’s federal O&C lands. DeFazio says HR 2647 shows a “glimmer of
hope on the House side” as it is more measured than previous forestry policy bills in re-
cent years. — Camilla Mortensen
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eugeneweekly.com • July 16, 2015
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