Hearing of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Proposed Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Request for the Forest Service

STATEMENT OF HON. RON WYDEN, U.S. SENATOR FROM OREGON

Senator Wyden. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be brief. I was going to go through exactly the same numbers that Senator
Bingaman mentioned in his address and I want to associate myself with his remarks.

I would just say to all of you at the Forest Service, what you have done is redefined the concept of thinning because that
is essentially what your budget is synonymous with. On all of the key areas where members of the U.S. Senate have tried to
reach and work in good faith with the Forest Service, you all are not willing to meet us halfway.

As Senator Bingaman touched on, we give these big speeches about working with the communities and a fresh approach with respect to dealing with fire in the long term. Senator Craig and I just put hours and hours into the Healthy Forest
legislation, and this budget basically takes away the tools to do it on the ground. I mean, that is what it really means.

When you strip down Senator Bingaman's budget cuts that he outlined area by area, what it means is these local communities across the country are not going to have the tools to do what was in the bipartisan Healthy Forest legislation. I look forward to your giving us some assessment on how it might be otherwise.

It is pretty interesting. The Forest Service fiscal year 2006 budget press release is entitled, ``President Bush reinforces commitment to cooperative conservation in the 2006 budget.'' Yet in all of these cooperative programs, which last
time I looked is what the President is talking about in his press release, there are big cuts and they are all over the
programs.

In total between the SPF and the WFM account, State Fire Assistance is proposed for a $22.8 million cut. That is 31
percent. Forest Health Management Cooperative Lands proposed for a $30.6 million, 53 percent cut.

This is not keeping faith with local communities. I am sure we are going to hear about how there is some sort of budgetary
sleight of hand that is going to let us avoid duplication and the like. I am telling you, that is not what we are hearing
from folks on the ground.

So I look forward to working with you, Mr. Chairman, and Senator Bingaman so that we can do what Congress set out to do
in a bipartisan way for legislation that got more than 80 votes in the U.S. Senate.

Senator Craig and I have often noted that we were not getting any forestry bills to the floor of the senate until the
``County Payments Bill'' and the ``Forest Health Bill.'' We worked in a bipartisan way. We are going to continue to do it.

It is not going to be possible to do it if we have these budgets that take away the tools to carry out the kind of
legislation that gets 80 votes in the U.S. Senate and constitutes a real breakthrough for the West.

So, Mr. Chairman, I look forward to working with you and Senator Bingaman and Senator Thomas here. All our colleagues
who put in all this time, I am anxious to work with you.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Senator Wyden. Chief, like others on this committee, I really put my heart and soul into the forest health legislation. I basically did not even leave the floor of the Senate while we were considering it.

I will tell you I am very troubled by the approach that you all are taking and it is both in terms of the numbers, and I
will go through those, but also even in terms of the way you describe the agency's work.

Even during the course of the debate, I thought we were finally making some headway in terms of changing our approach
with respect to fires. We were not going to put all the focus on suppression, but we were going to go into these key kinds of
areas, rehabilitation and restoration.

And even when you were here during the course of the legislation, you talked about fire plans, you talked about the
number of acres being treated in communities. And today you basically told us we were back to the old days. You talked
about knocking back fires and those were your words, not mine. 99 percent of the fires knocked back.

And certainly the numbers reflect the way that you have described it as well. I mean, the budget shifts the money again
into suppression and away from rehabilitation and restoration.

And so why don't you give me your take on it because I want to make this bipartisan wall work. We have 80 votes and we did not get 80 votes by accident. Senator Craig, all of my colleagues here, we wanted to make a dramatic shift.

And now both in terms of the budget numbers and certainly just the way you have described it, it just looks like we are
going back to the old days. We are going backward, not forward.

Mr. Bosworth. Senator Wyden, I don't agree. I do believe that our budget proposal----

Senator Wyden. You did not describe it differently 2 years ago? I will bring you the words. You talked about acres treated
and you talked about community fire plans and today you talked about knocking back 99 percent of the fires.

The budget numbers have shifted. So both in terms of the way you described it and the budget numbers, there has been a
change. Is that wrong?

Mr. Bosworth. The best way to reduce the amount of fire suppression is to do the kinds of fuels treatment work that we
need, particularly in and around communities, so that we can reduce the fire hazard in those communities. That is the best
long-term way in my view to reduce that whole chunk of fire suppression dollars.

In the meantime, we are going to continue to request a 10-year average in terms of our fire suppression dollars so that
we can help protect communities.

Our focus has to be on healthier forests. It has to be on reintroducing fire into some of these fire-adapted ecosystems
in a way that we can control it and maintain it using fire.

We allow far more fires to burn today than we have in the past. In terms of in the back country where we have fire
management plans, we allow fires to burn for purposes to improve the health of those forests.

So, in fact, I believe that we----

Senator Wyden. But the budget numbers, Chief, contradict that statement. There has been a cut in cooperative fire
assistance by $31.6 million. That is 30 percent. A cut in Forest Health Management, a cut in Cooperative Forestry, a cut
in State and Private Forestry.

I mean, I want to work with you and that is why we did pursue a bipartisan strategy in the forest health area. But
those are the numbers. The numbers are a 32--in fact, it was even higher. Excuse me. I misstated it. It is at $32 million, a
54-percent cut in Cooperative Fire Assistance.

I mean, those cooperative programs are the places where we are going to carry out the new and bipartisan vision and they
are all being cut 30, 40, and 50 percent.

Mr. Bosworth. Much of the Cooperative Fire Assistance to the States is for dollars that go to fire departments in
communities for fire suppression.

We also have the opportunity to take a percentage of our hazardous fuels dollars and grant that to communities to do
work on private land from our hazardous fuels account. We are proposing to increase by $18 million our hazardous fuels
dollars. Again, a portion of that can be granted to communities to do work on private land.

So there are a number of areas, a number of places where we believe that we can do work on private lands to help. Through our community fire planning process, we work together with the communities to decide and identify those places where we can strategically locate our treatments to help protect the communities.

That is a big part of our program. Those are all things that we were not talking about 4 or 5 years ago.

Mr. Rey. In fairness to the Chief, the 99 percent success rate on initial attack was my statement. That was in response
to the hearing we had last year after we grounded the air tankers when I think most of the members of this committee
thought we were going to leave the forests to burn.

My point was that we were more successful with a reconfiguration fleet than we had been the previous year. The
fact that we are successful in extinguishing fires on initial attack has no bearing on the fact that we want fires to burn
where we know that they can burn safely and within prescription.

We are committed to doing more of that and we have done more of that. The acres burned under prescription this past
year were, as were the acres treated, an all-time record.

You are correct, Senator, that if you look at the way we propose to fund the Healthy Forests Initiative, we have in this
budget proposal emphasized treatment on Federal land as opposed to treatment on non-Federal land. And we did that for two
reasons.

First, we are the only ones who are paying to treat Federal land. There is nobody else doing it.

Second, the Federal lands by and large are in worse shape from a fuels standpoint than the non-Federal lands. The Federal
lands within the wildland-urban interface are among the worst Federal lands.

And there is probably a third reason and that is that in many of these other line items, the ones that you indicated,
there are other finances available through other Federal Government programs to provide assistance to State and local
governments to do that work, in some cases more efficiently than our delivery program.

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