McClintock Touts ‘Fix Our Forests Act’
A bill has passed in the US House of Representatives that Mother Lode Republican Congressman Tom McClintock says will help “restore forest health and increase resiliency to catastrophic wildfires.”
McClintock is a co-sponsor of H.R. 471.
It expands, nationwide, reforms that were secured for the Tahoe Basin in the 2016 Winn Act, a pilot project which increased treated acreage in the Tahoe Basin.
Referencing earlier times, prior to increased regulations implemented over the the past several decades, McClintock stated on the US House Floor, “Every year, foresters would mark off surplus timber and we (US Forest Service) would auction it off to logging companies who paid us to remove it. For a century, we enjoyed healthy, fire resistant and resilient forests. But then we passed bureaucratic laws that have made the active management of our forests all but impossible. A simple forest management plan now takes an average of 5.3 years to complete and costs millions of dollars – more than the value of the timber to be harvested. Since these laws were passed, timber harvested from the federal lands has fallen 75 percent with a concomitant increase in acreage destroyed by fire.”
McClintock says in the nine years after the Tahoe Basin project was approved, it has reduced the approval process for forest thinning projects from five years to four months, and 800 pages to only a few dozen.
McClintock concluded, “This should not be a partisan issue. The choice is between policies that have proven to work and policies that have proven to fail. Let us return to the policies that work before we run out of forests to burn.”
The bill now moves to the Senate for consideration. McClintock’s full speech can be found here in the myMotherLode.com blog section.
More details about the bill can be read here.
