The Western Caucus

Floor Speech

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I thank my good friend from Hobbs, New Mexico, for yielding. Representing part of Pennsylvania, it is an honor to be part of the Western Caucus. I represent western Pennsylvania and central Pennsylvania and a little bit of eastern Pennsylvania. My district is so large, so rural.

It has many of the same issues, Mr. Speaker, that fit very well within the Western Caucus. We have public lands. All of these issues you are hearing about tonight in terms of what government does as a huge barrier and to kill the jobs, they are the same things that we certainly experience in western Pennsylvania.

Now, I am proud. I chair the largest subcommittee of Agriculture, Conservation, Energy, and Forestry, so I want to go down another road in which how government kills jobs, western jobs, whether it is the West or western Pennsylvania or, frankly, throughout the United States.

We recently had a hearing reviewing the proposed United States Forest Service plan. Our National Forests, it is very clear they are not National Parks. Our National Forests were created to provide sustainable resources, predominantly timber, but timber is not the only thing. Our forests were created to provide us energy, access to oil, to natural gas, to coal, to minerals. So that is why they were put in existence.

As we look around the Nation, certainly in my congressional district, my National Forest is relatively small compared to I think some in the West, 513,000 acres, but it is profitable and home to the world's best hardwood cherry. It has a management plan that says in a sustainable way, to keep the forest healthy they are supposed to harvest over 90 million board feet a year. But yet for over a decade they have been doing 20 million. One of the members of my subcommittee, Mr. Southerland, talked about his National Forest, they harvest zero board feet out of his National Forest.

Now, there are a lot of problems with that. First of all, if you don't harvest timber, if you don't manage that forest in a healthy way, you subject yourself to wildfires, to invasive species. It creates an unhealthy forest. But it also kills jobs, and that is what we have seen. We have seen that all across the Nation, in the West, frankly, all parts of the country with our National Forests where the Forest Service has failed to do its job in terms of managing the forests I think in a productive way. That point came out very clearly in the first of what will be I think a number of hearings that we are going to do on this issue.

Frankly, timber production is down. I am proud to say that it is up to 40 million board feet in the Allegheny National Forest, but that is only with the persistence of kind of being with the Forest Service almost on a constant basis. But it is still a long ways from 90.

The production of timber is down. That means timber jobs, first of all. Our sawmills, our timber industry, those jobs, in many parts of the country those jobs have gone away. They are extinct today. And the forest products jobs that come as a result of having that timber supply are going away.

And the economies. Our rural communities were taken in order to create these national forests by the Federal Government. And the economies of our rural communities that make up those forests depended on the promise that was made when the forests were formed that the timber industry, minerals, oil, gas, coal, all those sustainable resources would be provided, would be produced, and that would maintain the economies of those rural communities. Well, that's been a lie by the Federal Government. They haven't done that. They haven't met their responsibilities. And that has killed jobs and killed our economies in rural communities.

In terms of energy, in my district I was sworn in for the first time in Congress in January 2009. Within a week of when I was sworn in, the Forest Service chose to place a moratorium on any new drilling permits in my national forest.

Now, you have to understand, 93 of the subsurface rights are privately owned. So these are owned by private individuals. And they came in and imposed this moratorium because of some lawsuit, as my good friend talked about, and the taxpayers paid their lawyers and paid the organizations to file, basically, and we went over a year with people losing their jobs, families suffering for just that reason.

Thankfully, a Federal judge overturned that decision. Of course, the Forest Service appealed and the Federal judge threw it out again. And now the Forest Service has appealed again. They've taken it down to a different court, down to the Philadelphia court, and we'll see what turns out there. But that's just another example of just bad government.

My good friend Mrs. Lummis from Wyoming talked about the Marcellus natural gas. Let me just say that's all private sector. The government is not involved in it. Natural gas is mostly private lands. And it works. It has created over 88,000 jobs in Pennsylvania. I have counties that, for the first time in history, their unemployment rates are below both State and national averages.

Prosperity is a good thing, and everybody benefits--not just the people that are getting the royalties or the leases, but, frankly, the churches, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the little leagues, the fire departments, the hospitals, because rural folks are generous and they support good causes.

And so the communities are growing. The annual average earnings are going up. Frankly, government is benefiting because local, State, and even the Federal Government is getting a little more tax revenue by all that economic activity. And unemployment is down and energy security is there, and it's lower energy costs for everyone, and it's private sector.

If the government owned that land, we'd never be experiencing those benefits. Though, despite that fact, despite these are private lands--and I'll end my comments with these, because I know we've got other Members that want to speak tonight--this administration is going after that natural gas production. They are. There are some in this body that are proposing Federal Government overreach.

We're accessing that energy as a good steward. We've got regulations. The Department of Environmental Protection in Pennsylvania is a tough agency, but they do a fair job. They're always looking at their regulations. But we've got this administration who wants the Federal Government to employ the EPA and to send them into Pennsylvania and other parts of our country where we're producing domestic energy, which will essentially shut down our energy production and will shut down this prosperity, will shut down these jobs that are being created, will shut down the movement that we're making towards energy security.

I want to thank my good friend from New Mexico for hosting this hour tonight. I'm proud to be a part of the Western Caucus and proud to be with you this evening.

Thank you.

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