Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Madam Chair, I would like to first thank my colleague from California, Representative Panetta, for his cosponsorship of this bipartisan amendment. I also would like to thank Representative McCollum from Minnesota for her support of this amendment.

Madam Chair, this amendment simply adds $10 million to the State and private forestry fund. The purpose of this is to prevent some of these catastrophic wildfires that we have been seeing over the past few years.

What we have here is a map that shows what the Forest Service has delineated as a wildland-urban interface. This is where forestry and urban areas intersect, and this is where we have potential for significant loss of property and lives.

There are already programs in place to manage these wildland-urban interfaces, and what we hope to do with this additional appropriation is just to help the State forestry units manage these areas better.

We talk a lot in Congress about Federal lands and how we need to manage those, but across the country, over half of all forestland is owned by private forest landowners. There are literally millions of these private forest landowners, many of them on very small parcels of forestland, and they have no incentive to manage them to help stop the spread of catastrophic wildfire.

What the State and private forestry program does is allows State foresters to go in and help these private landowners to understand how to manage their forests and give them the assistance they need so that we can make these wildland-urban interfaces safer places.

Madam Chair, if we managed everything perfectly on the Federal lands and these wildland-urban interfaces, you still have the issue of all the private lands. The map shows wildland-urban interfaces in places you would expect out in California and other Western States, but because of the population density, we see a lot of these wildland-urban interfaces are in the East where there is more dense populations.

So these funds, although rather small in relation to this huge bill-- as a matter of fact, they make up only eight one-hundredths of 1 percent of the total funds in this bill--would have a huge impact all across the country in making our communities more resilient to catastrophic wildfire, would really help to save property and lives in the future, and would also save a lot of future disaster supplemental funding that the Federal Government would have to dish out.

So, again, I am just asking for this amendment to help State and private forests with a $10 million plus-up to their funds.

Madam Chair, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Panetta).

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Madam Chair, this bill, again, would help State and private forests. It would help to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. It is sound environmentally, and it is a good investment for the Federal Government.

Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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