Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support and as an original cosponsor of H.R. 2647, the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015.

Since the inception of the National Forest System in 1905, the fundamental mission of the Forest Service has been to manage our Federal forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. As a result, the Forest Service has played a critical role in rural America, partnering to produce timber, natural resources, and jobs, while sustaining the ecological health of the forests and surrounding watersheds.

National forests have been extremely successful in creating recreational and educational opportunities for millions of Americans. However, our forests are facing declining health and simply are not managed as well as they need to be due to numerous challenges that have grown over the past few decades.

Often unnecessary and prolonged planning processes limit the Service from effectively managing our forests. This also goes along with the constant litigation, or even the threat of litigation in some cases. Both of these situations keep boots in the office instead of in the forests and spend money on doing paperwork instead of work in the field.

The costs of suppressing and fighting wildfires has been a growing challenge for the Forest Service, with their fire costs increasing from 13 percent of the Forest Service budget in 1995 to approximately half of the annual budget today. This epidemic of declining health and catastrophic wildfires are in direct correlation to policies that have led to a dramatic decrease in managed acres. Timber harvests have drastically plummeted from almost 13 billion board feet in the late 1980s to only 3 billion board feet of timber in recent years. At the same time, the number of acres affected by the catastrophic wildfires has doubled from around 3 million acres during the second record timber harvest to 6 million acres now.

This bill reverses this cycle by ending the destructive fire borrowing problem that robs Peter to pay Paul, and it does so in a fiscally responsible manner, with the funds only made available for wildfire suppression. In my view, this legislation is the next step to build upon the groundwork laid by the 2014 farm bill and is an earnest attempt to give the Forest Service more authority and much-needed flexibility to deal with these challenges of process, funding, litigation, necessary timber harvesting, and much-needed management.

H.R. 2647 incentivizes and rewards collaborations with the private sector on management activities. It allows for State and third-party funding of projects. The bill reauthorizes the resource advisory committees, known as RACs, while returning county shares of forest receipts for long-term stewardship projects.

Perhaps most importantly, the bill provides commonsense categorical exclusions, or CEs, for certain Forest Service projects. These CEs are routine and have known impacts and will expedite the planning process to get projects up and running.

To conclude, this is a thoughtful piece of legislation that will do much to help the Forest Service to better do its job. I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes.''

I reserve the balance of my time.

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