Concurrent Resolution on the Budget, Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, first of all, I wish to thank Chairman ENZI for his courtesy in allowing me to take a few minutes to discuss a bipartisan amendment I will be offering on this bill. It deals with what I think is going to be an enormous challenge this summer for the West, and that is dealing with this wildfire challenge and the prospect that we could literally have enormous fires--what could be virtually infernos--throughout the West this summer.

I make that judgment because recently when I was home, I got a briefing. For example, in Medford, OR, they told me it was the driest it had been for 25 years. In Medford, when you get an update on the fires--and, colleagues, it is worth noting that nobody used to have a fire briefing in March. That is just unheard of. We have fire briefings well into the summer. But fires are getting to be a year-round occurrence. I was there in March, and the fire experts said it is going to be very dry. When you look southward to California, all you see is dry, dry, dry.

The fact is that as it gets drier and as it gets hotter on the forest floor, should lightning strike, which is very common in rural America, all of a sudden you can have an inferno on your hands and one that really knows no boundaries and can affect private property owners, State lands, and Federal lands. We had an important hearing in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee the other day on the sportsmen's bill. It looked as if there were a lot of good ideas in the bipartisan bill, but it will be pretty hard to go hunting and fishing in the forests this summer if the forests are burning up.

So what a bipartisan group of us from the West want to do--and I particularly commend our colleague Senator Crapo of Idaho. He and I have teamed up on this effort. We have a large bipartisan coalition of Senators who have joined us. We want to fix the broken system of fighting wildfire in America.

What happens today, colleagues, is that the accounts for prevention get short shrift. In effect, the work that needs to be done with the smaller trees and thinning out the underbrush doesn't get the funding that is needed, so what happens is, as a result of the lack of prevention, you have these bigger fires and you have to put them out. The accounts for dealing with fire suppression are also short of money, so what happens at that point is the agencies borrow from the prevention fund to put the fire out, and the problem just gets worse and worse.

So what Senator Crapo and I, with, as I have indicated, a large bipartisan coalition of Senators, are seeking to do is to end that kind of fire borrowing. What we are proposing is that the biggest fires--perhaps the 1 percent of the fires that really turn into infernos--you would fight those from the disaster fund because they are, in fact, disasters.

We have received an analysis from the budget officials indicating that this would really be a wash from a budgeting standpoint because, in effect, while you do spend a bit of money from the disaster fund putting out these infernos, you also generate some real savings from the prevention fund by not having as many fires in the first place.

What our bipartisan amendment will do is give the Departments of Agriculture and Interior the opportunity to access the disaster fund for that 1 percent of the fires that can really break a community apart. It seems to me that Americans across the country who live in communities where there are these fires deserve to know their homes and lives are not going to be threatened needlessly. That is what we will be able to prevent with this bipartisan amendment.

Freeing up the Forest Service funds that our proposal will do will ensure that the natural resources agencies have the resources they need to improve forest health and fund the very preventive work that is needed to reduce the size and severity of future fires.

We are going to be joined in this amendment. As I have indicated, Senator Crapo and I base it on our bipartisan bill. Senators STABENOW and BALDWIN will be cosponsors, and I believe others will as well.

It is an important amendment and it is an urgent amendment because we need to have this in place quickly so as to give the natural resources agencies and our communities the tools they need this summer.

It is a real wake-up call when you get a fire briefing in March. That is an indication that we have a very, very difficult fire season coming up. This bipartisan amendment ensures that in a cost-effective way we give our natural resources agencies the tools they need to fight these infernos and protect our communities.

Once again, I thank the distinguished chairman of the committee, Senator Enzi, for giving me this time.

I yield the floor.

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