Fire Borrowing

Floor Speech

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Mr. CRAPO. Mr. President, I strongly agree with my friend and colleague Senator Wyden from Oregon. He is absolutely right that we have been working on this for probably 5 years as we have worked to identify the solution and then build the coalition of support to implement the solution that is necessary for this critical problem.

I am also very appreciative, as Senator Wyden has said, that we had the chairman of the Energy Committee, the chairman of the Budget Committee, and the chairman of the Agriculture Committee engaged in a colloquy last week discussing the urgency of resolving this issue. I believe we are now getting to a point at which the understanding of how critical it is to resolve this issue has penetrated deeply into the political fiber of both the Senate and the House. Now we need to take that momentum and continue to move forward.

As we take stock of last year's fire season, the statistics are sobering. Senator Wyden referenced a little bit of it. Let me just add to that a little bit.

Nationally, last year, we had 68,151 fires that burned 10.1 million acres and cost over $1.7 billion in suppression operations. These fires accounted for the loss of roughly 4,600 structures, and, most tragically, the lives of 13 wild land firefighters.

This set of statistics is a set of statistics that is growing every year. We are seeing more fires and more catastrophic fires every year because we are not managing our forests properly, and we are not dealing with the crisis that is creating in forest fires.

There is a very important statistic that I think everyone in America should understand about this critical issue. I just said that there were 68,151 fires in America last year. One percent of those fires cost 30 percent of the firefighting budget. Those are the fires that became catastrophes. They became catastrophic. The solution we have come together on to help address this issue is simply to make a very obvious conclusion and to put it into the law; that is, when we get a fire that is 1 percent of the fires that cost 30 percent of the firefighting and do so much of the damage, we declare that they are natural disasters-- just like the earthquakes, the hurricanes, the tornadoes, the floods and the other disasters that we acknowledge here in Congress and deal with as disasters when we finance the efforts to fight them and to respond to them.

With these numbers in mind, I want to again thank the committee chairmen who came to the floor last week and engaged in a colloquy to express how serious this issue is. It is getting to a crisis point. As those Senators last week noted, when it comes to how we fight wildfires, we are in a crisis.

For more than a decade, as fires have raged across the West, we have seriously underbudgeted for the necessary suppression costs with these disasters. To make matters worse, the lack of resources to fight the worst of our annual fires has forced land management agencies into what Senator Wyden has so ably described--fire borrowing that results in less money for the very activities that can prevent the large devastating fires from happening in the first place. What happens is our management agencies, the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and those who deal with the wild lands and grasses that burn, have had to borrow from all of their other funds so that they can't adequately manage the land. As a result, we end up with more bad fires, and every year the catastrophic fires grow.

When the Forest Service is forced to borrow to fight fires, they are actually borrowing against jobs, recreational opportunities, and proper forest management. The best way to think of fire borrowing is less timber, less jobs, and less access to these beautiful lands because while it is fire borrowing, in many cases it delays the repayment in ways that actually cancel projects, undercut the ability to implement proper forest management, lose jobs, and reduce access to our public lands. Perhaps the most destructive is the fact that less work in the woods means that the harmful cycle just gets worse.

As Senator Wyden has noted, to address this problem, we have consistently introduced legislation for years now that would treat the devastating fires as the disasters that they are.

I need to back up for a second. We talk about the fact that there is a cost that is not being provided for by Congress and that this fire borrowing has to happen, but I think it is critical to note that our solution has been scored by both the Congressional Budget Office and by the OMB at the White House as having zero budget impact. It will not increase the deficit because we do end up paying to fight these fires, it is just the way that we end up paying to fight them is the way we deal with so much of our catastrophic health care--at the emergency room with the most expensive solutions, the worst outcomes, and we don't deal with the underlying crisis.

While there is broad agreement from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and in both Houses of Congress that a fix to fire borrowing is needed, there have been different approaches to the solution. Senator Wyden and I have been very willing to work with those who have different ideas about how we need to solve this problem and can actually make adjustments in our legislation as we move forward to deal with issues and concerns that others have raised.

We are now at the crisis point, and now we need to move forward and put a final resolution in place. Senator Wyden and I have worked with these lawmakers and will continue to work with them. We are simply here tonight to say that we are very pleased to see that the leadership of the critical committees in the Senate and others who are so concerned about this issue are in agreement that we need to put this on the front burner and engage with developing a solution and putting it into law.

I look forward to working with Senator Wyden, the chairman of our Energy, Budget, and Agriculture Committees, and all the interested stakeholders whom Senator Wyden mentioned--250 groups from across the political spectrum. This is one of those issues in which those groups that so often have different perspectives on how to manage our public lands are in agreement, and we need to take this support--the political agreement that is taking place and the political awareness of the crisis that is happening--and move forward to the implementation of a solution.

I appreciate the opportunity to come to the floor tonight and talk with Senator Wyden one more time about this as we move to the final stages of implementing this important legislation.

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