H.Res. 457

Mr. Speaker, I respectfully demand one-third of the time under clause 8 of rule XXII.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

(Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, it is abundantly clear to all of us of all political persuasions and parts of the country that we need a vigorous, well-funded, well-prioritized hazardous fuels reduction program in our national forests.

The Nation needs that because of a ``perfect storm,'' if I may use that term, of enormous changes in our climate which have led to drought, particularly in the western United States, leaving the most explosive conditions due to the lack of moisture in over 100 years and because of our misguided and mutually ignorant policy over the last several decades, if not century, of suppressing all fire, thereby allowing certain additional density to increase. All of us know we need a well-prioritized, well-funded, well-defined hazardous fuels reduction program.

But I, regretfully, cannot support this bill because it fails in several fundamental ways. It fails to prioritize the taxpayers' dollars where they ought to be prioritized which is the protect of human health and property first. It fails to protect our most treasured crown jewels in our Forest Service of our roadless areas, which I have to tell the Members in the part of the world where I come from, we treasure the roadless areas on our weekends and afternoons. It is part of our culture and our families, and they are unprotected in this bill. Third, it fails to adequately solve the problem as to why we cannot get these programs completed, which is money, and I will come back to that. We today change the law, but not the appropriations that we need to get this job done.

Let me start with a failure to prioritize in this bill. If I may, this ought to be job one for the U.S. Congress when it comes to hazardous fuels reduction. Job one for the U.S. Congress ought to be protecting, with a protective buffer, the homes and towns and cabins and barns in our thousands of acres from voracious forest fire, and this bill does not follow a fundamental precept that when we have got job one and when we have got limited dollars, we prioritize. To govern is to choose, and this bill consciously chose not to give the majority of funds in this program to protect these areas with moats, if I may, to protect them from this horrendous fire. And we have seen what happens in California when that occurs. And it ought to be a totally unanimous agreement here that the majority of our funds in our program ought to be directed to the areas around our towns and cities rather than spent up in Timbuktu harvesting commercial lumber.

We have seen that they split the baby 50/50, but spliting the baby 50/50 is not always right nor is it fair, and I will tell my colleagues why. This conference report says 50 percent of this money will go to the Wildland-Urban Interface. It will not do to tell people in this community that we have saved half their houses, and we have sacrificed the other half to the demands of those who want to continue commercial logging in our roadless areas. We failed in our duty to prioritize our precious dollars where they belong, and we have offered a modest amendment to improve that in the conference committee which were rejected out of hand.

And let me tell the Members why this prioritization is so important. Of the dollars we have spent next year, if we double the amount that has been appropriated by the majority party, whom I respect, and I respect their positions on this bill, but if we even double the amount that was spent in the last 3 years, we will still only do 2 to 3, maybe 4 percent of the acreage of the millions of acres that need to be treated. We have to prioritize. This bill did not do it.

The second thing this bill did not do, it did not protect our roadless areas. We have 58 million acres of roadless areas which are the crown jewels of our national forest, which are pristine, and everyone loves the trees in our roadless areas. The problem is some of them love them vertically and some of them like them horizontally. This bill does not protect our roadless areas from the ones who want to do commercial logging so that they will be horizontal. It does not protect them one wit in those roadless areas, and that is most discomforting, and I will tell the Members why. We should have been able to fashion a unanimous way to protect those roadless areas. Let me just suggest one way to do it. I offered an amendment in the conference committee that would simply say that if we have to, if there is some terrible disease- ridden patch in the roadless area that we have to build a road to get to it, to do an emergency program that would be allowed under this bill, okay; but let us at least restore the road after the project is completed to its original topography. How can anyone object to that? How could anyone object to that precept? If we are building a road in a roadless area to do a hazardous fuels reduction program, when we are done with the program, why not put the road back in its natural topography. Who could object to it? I will tell the Members who does object to it. The timber industry who wants to use these roads to punch them into the heart of our most virginal forests and then make them available for commercial harvest, and we do not need to do that to accomplish our ends here, and it is regrettable we did not solve that problem.

The third thing that this bill does not do, it does not cut to the heart of the problem. This bill, its whole fundamental idea is if we just cut off those pesky environmentalists, by gum there will not be any more forest fires. I will give the Members bad news. We can outlaw environmentalists if we want to, and I see some nods. My friend over on this side of the aisle would like to do that. I take a different view. They are my constituents. They are people who like to go up and have clean water out of the roadless areas. They are people who like to go on a picnic in the roadless areas, and they know, as I do, that if all we try to do to fix this program is to cut off citizen participation,

we will not solve the problem of getting these fuels reduction programs in line, and I will tell the Members why we will not. The reason we have we are not getting the job done and giving therapy to our forests is that we have not appropriated one tenth of the money that is necessary to get this job done. It is not appeals. Come on. The GAO, in their last study, after four rounds to make sure they got it right, said that 92 percent of all of these fuels reduction projects go lickity-split right through the process without any problems and only 3 percent of them were litigated. Ninety-seven percent of these projects go through without litigation. So why have we not cut the mustard? Why have we not done enough therapy on these forests? It is because we have not invested the money to do it. We have only invested enough money to do 2 to 3 percent, and that is not going to significantly improve in this bill. Doubling does not even cut it, even if we got the appropriation. So we are united, I think, unanimously on this floor in the belief that we need to have a strong fuels reduction program, but we cannot say that this bill will provide what the American people need to get this job done in a reasonable fashion.

The fourth, if I can, problem with this bill: It is clear that we have got to cut down a whole bunch of trees to solve this problem because they are dense, they have grown up because of our misguided fuels suppression program, and now we have got this cataclysmic fire situation. But the question is what do we cut and where? That is really the issue we need to resolve on the floor of this House. And here is a tree, a mature tree. I wish I could tell the age, marked for cutting in the fuels reduction program. There is no reason to cut that tree except for commercial purposes. We needed to develop a firm definition, so that the Forest Service can use it to determine what trees to cut, and it would have been easier if we provided them adequate money to do it, so they do not have an incentive to log bigger trees to generate money for this program. But we did not do it, because the appropriations process did not cut the mustard. So we have a problem that we have not given adequate definition of what to cut and where.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Hinchey).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Udall).

(Mr. UDALL of New Mexico asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I will be closing, so when the appropriate order comes, I will take my turn.

Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I commend all of the people who have worked on this bill. There are a lot of technical and difficult issues trying to fashion a hazardous fuels reduction program. And I am unable to support this and I hope my colleagues will join me and the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters and other main-line commonsense groups who have committed their lives to protecting our national forests in defeating this bill and moving on to a better one, and I hope that my colleagues will join me.

Underlying that position is the basic belief that the medicine that we are providing here is both inadequate and misguided. It is misguided because it is based on a myth; and that myth rising to an urban legend is that these fires have consumed thousands of acres because people have questioned what some government officials have done, and that is an abject falsehood.

The GAO report shows that 92 percent of these projects go ahead unimpeded. In California, you know why the California projects did not get done? It was not environmental project appeals. In the last 3 years, there has not been one hazardous fuel reduction program that held up national forests in Southern California the last 3 years. The reason some of this work did not get done is Uncle Sam, us, did not appropriate enough money for California to do the job. The State of California asked for $430 million last April to solve this problem. And what did Uncle Sam do in the Bush administration? They did not give it to them. And the fires occurred.

This is a failure of appropriations, not a failure because certain citizens once in a blue moon have the temerity to stand up on their back legs and question decisions by the Forest Service to do disguised commercial logging which has on occasion happened, thankfully not very often. Maybe 2 percent of the time. We are not doing enough to really solve this problem.

What we have done is in one of the most serious reductions of citizens' ability to question their government is reduce the ability to have their oversight of our Federal officials.

Now, it is kind of a conservative position to be rightfully sometimes distrustful of our Federal officials. Now, I have got to say there have been occasions, thankfully few, where these projects have been disguised timber sales. And the reason is because we are not appropriating enough to the Forest Service to do their job. And when that has happened, less than three pearls of the time there has been a brief appeal of that decision, and most frequently these things get worked out. But until we increase tenfold our appropriations, we are not going to cut the mustard in this program.

Now, let me mention something else, too. We have not talked about what the real debate is about here. The debate is as much about roads as it is about forests, because the real issue here is where we are going to build roads. We have 440,000 miles of Forest Service roads in our forests, 440,000 miles. They are falling apart, and we ought to be putting our money in and fixing those roads before we punch new roads into roadless areas.

Let me put this into real-life perspective. Take a couple in northeast Washington who is not getting adequately protected by this bill. Their house is surrounded by pine trees in the national forest. We have not prioritized those pine forests around their home for treatment like we should have in this bill. We did not do it. Now, when that couple leaves their home to drive over to the Olympic Peninsula to the Jupiter Ridge Roadless Area, if they hike out to a nice little picnic spot, they will find two trees. They are about maybe 6, 7, 8 feet in diameter, cedars, right next to each other. We call them Jefferson and Washington.

In this bill, neither protects that couple in their home surrounded by the pine forest, nor the two trees they go to visit in the roadless area.

Their home is not protected from fire adequately, and those two trees are not protected from chainsaws adequately in this bill.

It is my hope that this bill will be defeated and we will come back and make some very modest but important improvements on it to solve both of those problems.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I compliment the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) for his management of this bill. Let me just talk a little bit about the judicial review test here, because I think that we are embarking on new ground. When we put in a test that talks about short-term and long-term, really what we are ending up doing is saying that if you cut down the whole forest and it is okay in 100 years, then that is all right. I mean, that is the kind of test that we are putting into this piece of legislation. We do not know what that means. And so we are encroaching into the judicial arena, trying to tell the courts what to do. This is a new test. It is a new standard. It has never been used before.

And what is going to happen? We hear all the talk about lawsuits and litigation from this side of the aisle. Guess what, folks? This is going to be a lawyers employment bill. If there is anything that is going to come out of this, it is going to be more litigation, it is going to be more billable time, it is going to be more lawyers involved in this process. And I think what is going to happen further, if we allow this to happen, if we allow this to happen, we are going to see this appear across the board in other areas, workers' rights, OSHA, any place where Federal agency decision-making is going on, this is going to be imposed on the Federal courts. And I think that is why the committees that supervise in the Congress judicial review have such a hard time with this provision.

With that, I would just urge my colleagues to vote against this bill.

The recent firestorm in Southern California acted to once again remind us of the gravity of rampant wildfires in the west. However, this issue is of such great importance that I am extremely concerned about, and strongly object to, the manner that this legislation was brought before us today.

You may recall that the Committee Print of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act was released to the members of the Resources Committee during a recess period, on the Friday afternoon before it was scheduled to be marked up in Resources committee, a few days later.

Similarly, we are called upon today to vote on the Healthy Forests Conference Committee report. This report was just released yesterday. It is my understanding that the rules for the House call for a minimum of 3 days of review of a conference report before it is voted upon.

So, in what now seems to be standard operating procedure of the House, we have barely had twenty-four hours, if that, to read and digest its contents. One day is hardly sufficient to allow all Members to carefully and thoughtfully consider this vital legislation.

I would like to point out that H.R. 1904 was not the sole option available for our protection from wildfire devastation. Mr. Udall of Colorado and I introduced H.R. 1042, the Forest Restoration and Fire Risk Reduction Act.

Had we had an opportunity to hold hearings on our bill, Mr. Udall and I would have been able to formally raise some of the issues that I view are not adequately addressed in H.R. 1904 or the conference report, but that are critically important to wildlife prevention and protection.

Our bill would place greater emphasis on protection of the ``wildland/urban interface'' without imposing the unprecedented deadlines and standards for injunctive relief on the Federal judiciary, and without emasculating our environmental laws that are present in both H.R. 1904 and the Report.

While the results of the conference are better than the version passed by the House, the provisions that I view to be most controversial remain in the text. The agreement places a greater emphasis on thinning forests very close to communities, but, like the House bill, it significantly limits environmental reviews of forest thinning projects and insect infestation field research projects.

I reemphasize that I believe that we must conduct thinning projects to help reduce the likelihood of unusually severe fires. However, I do not support the contention that to facilitate such projects we need to expunge our environmental laws and procedures for public comment and participation.

The limits placed on fire-risk reduction projects from environmental review and administrative appeals, especially in the wildland

urban interface, in effect constrain the provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act. Furthermore, denying the public the full and fair opportunity to have viable alternatives to agency action considered circumvents established policy of public participation.

Such participation is an important aspect of our democratic process for making decisions affecting public lands. Limiting public comment and ignoring the provisions of NEPA and other laws designed to protect our environment does not assist in developing sound forest management.

I believe, however, that the conference report is a better bill than the version passed by the House. The Report contains specific provisions to protect the wildland urban interface. Furthermore, the report authorizes tribal watershed management programs for Indian tribes, an issue that I have strongly advocated for since we began working on this legislation in the 107th Congress.

Nonetheless, I am afraid that this legislation is just another assault by the Bush Administration on our Nation's forests. Most of the attacks over the last year have been below the radar--in arcane rules, stealth riders and misnamed legislation. In this many-fronted assault, big timber is the winner.

Under the guise of buzz words such as forest health, catastrophic- wildfire prevention and streamlining, the Administration's initiatives transform forest policy in ways that are staggering in their scope as well as in their implications for democracy.

The changes revamp laws fundamental to sound forest management, including the National Forest Management Act, the Appeals Reform Act and NEPA. The cumulative effect of these changes is to undermine or eliminate open decisionmaking, agency accountability, resource protection and recourse in the courts.

It began in December 2002, when the Administration proposed a forest- planning regulation that renders public involvement virtually meaningless. The rule ignores scientific involvement, eliminates fish and wildlife protection, and fails to protect roadless areas.

It skews the planning process to favor logging, mining and off-road vehicle use. It renders plan standards more discretionary, further reducing agency accountability. Most shocking, the final rule, due out imminently, exempts forest plans from environmental analysis and eliminates the opportunity for the public to appeal the final plan.

The Forest Service assured critics that it would undertake in-depth environmental studies when specific logging projects were proposed. Not so.

In June 2003, the Administration abolished environmental review of logging done in the name of ``hazardous fuels reduction'' on up to 1,000 acres of land as well as post-fire rehabilitation projects on up to 4,200 acres.

One month later, the Administration carved out more loopholes for National Environmental Policy Act exemptions for commercial logging by setting acreage limits of 70 acres for timber sales and 250 acres for salvage sales. These projects have few, if any, meaningful constraints.

For example, the projects must be ``consistent'' with local forest plans. Yet, under the soon-to-be final planning regulations, forest plans can be amended simply by changing the plan on an interim basis with no public notice.

Under the banner of hazardous fuels reductions, large-scale, intensive commercial logging projects may take place virtually anywhere in our forests, regardless of forest type or tree size. In effect, the conference report allows logging and associated road building with limited environmental analysis, administrative appeals, judicial review and public involvement.

The Appeals Reform Act of 1992 gave citizens a statutory right of appeal after the Forest Service tried to eliminate appeals on timber sales. Although billed as part of the ``Healthy Forests Initiative,'' changes to these regulations significantly curtail rights to appeal a broad range of timber sales and land management decisions--not just those pertaining to fire risk.

H.R. 1904 sets no time frames for appeal, no required stay of action provision during the appeal, and no guaranteed right to appeal. Instead, the Forest Service would have 30 days after enactment of this legislation to develop the new administrative appeals process.

This legislation also pushes citizens out of the picture. In addition to altering the intentions of the Appeals Reform Act, H.R. 1904 reduces environmental review on logging projects not already given a wholesale exemption and severely restricts opportunities for public involvement.

Furthermore, it encroaches upon the courts' ability to review the legality of logging projects almost anywhere on our publicly owned forests, including roadless areas and old growth. If bug and disease- control are the purported reasons for logging, projects up to 1,000 acres will bypass all environmental review and appeals.

With millions of dollars authorized in the act for any hazardous fuels project on public lands, logging without laws can proceed throughout the backcountry.

The synergistic effects of these radical rollbacks are breathtaking. I predict that the assault will only foment more controversy and stimulate more distrust of the Forest Service for years to come.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 457, I call up the conference report on the bill (H.R. 1904) to improve the capacity of the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior to plan and conduct hazardous fuels reduction projects on National Forest System lands and Bureau of Land Management lands aimed at protecting communities, watersheds, and certain other at-risk lands from catastrophic wildfire, to enhance efforts to protect watersheds and

address threats to forest and rangeland health, including catastrophic wildfire, across the landscape, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from California (Mr. Pombo), chairman of the Committee on Resources, be recognized for 10 minutes for the purposes of controlling debate.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Today, we are finally able to bring the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, H.R. 1904, for a vote. In spite of a severely flawed process to arrive at this point, we have driven a hard bargain, and we have got a bill that the President will sign. I believe it will make a difference on the ground, but it is only a first step towards fixing what is wrong with the management of our public lands.

I worked with two other distinguished full committee chairmen, the gentleman from California (Mr. Pombo) of the Committee on Resources and the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) of the Committee on the Judiciary, to craft a bipartisan bill that passed earlier this year by an overwhelming, and bipartisan, majority. I also want to note the outstanding efforts of my counterpart in the other Chamber, Agriculture Committee Chairman Cochran, and our distinguished ranking member, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm), for their efforts.

This bill seeks to address the issues that have tied the hands of our forest managers: National Environmental Policy Act analysis that drags on for months, administrative appeals that spring up at the last minute, and court actions that stall projects for so long that areas proposed for treatment frequently are destroyed by fires long before the judicial process concludes. The conference process has produced a bill that does not do as much as I would like to address on these issues. I understand there are many in both Chambers who would like to have seen a stronger product. But this bill creates the first real relief from bureaucratic gridlock after over 8 years of legislative effort. It sends a clear signal that the Congress favors results over process and that protecting our communities, our watersheds, and our people is more important than producing mountains of paperwork.

There are over 190 million acres of forests and rangelands which remain at risk of catastrophic wildfires, insect and disease, a landmass larger than New England. Our bill takes the modest step of addressing the hazardous conditions on only 20 million acres of this total. This bill also takes an innovative approach to forest health on private lands, creating new nonregulatory, incentive-based approaches to promote conservation on private lands. In short, it takes a national approach to a national problem.

H.R. 1904 has enjoyed broad support from groups such as the Society of American Foresters, the National Volunteer Fire Council, the International Association of Fire Chiefs and others. Professional wildlife managers, sportsmen, and serious conservation groups all support this bill.

We as a Congress have more work to do to perfect our forest management laws. Forest fires are a symptom of a land management system that suffers from procedural, managerial, and practical gridlock. Our forest management laws, environmental laws, and procedural laws do not work well together. They create a process that only highly trained legal minds can comprehend; and while claiming to encourage citizen participation, they often achieve just the opposite. So we need to do more, but we should be proud of what we are doing today. We are taking a bipartisan step toward better management of our forests. We are saying that protecting our communities, our watersheds, and our people comes before protecting the dilatory tactics of those who oppose any type of sensible land management.

I applaud President Bush for helping to bring this about. We would not be on the verge of passing this bill without his leadership. I hope he continues to exert leadership in this field to ensure that the Federal land managers act aggressively to implement this program as quickly as possible. I will do my utmost to ensure that bureaucratic inaction does not delay implementation. I urge my colleagues to support this conference report.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht), chairman of the Department Operations, Oversight, Nutrition, and Forestry Subcommittee of the House Committee on Agriculture.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Rehberg).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Burns).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Colorado (Mrs. Musgrave).

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I will clarify a point that the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) is interested in. Let me state that the projects authorized by title IV are primarily scientific efforts, and scientific methods should be the primary means of assessing them. While we encourage multiparty monitoring, it is not our intent to require it, particularly for projects conducted under title IV.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let me start by thanking the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) for yielding me 2 additional minutes for this close, but more importantly for the very cooperative way in which the House Committee on Agriculture has produced this legislation. This is truly the example of why this bill will pass by an overwhelming margin here today.

It passed out of the House Committee on Agriculture originally on a voice vote; and when it came to the floor, I believe, 19 of the 24 Democrats on the committee, Members who represent rural areas, Members who represent areas that are forests, voted for this legislation, nearly 80 percent.

Had we had that kind of support elsewhere in the Congress, this legislation would have been adopted a long time ago. It has been 8 years that we have been working on it. And I would have to say to the gentleman from Washington State (Mr. Inslee) that if we were not to pass this conference report, not to send it to the President, we would be working on this for many more years. We would see more years like this year where 6\1/2\ million acres of forest land in this country were burned to the ground.

That is what we are faced with. That is why we need to begin this first step of solving this problem by giving the Forest Service the tools that it needs.

It is absolutely incorrect that these forest fires are not related to the problems that the Forest Service is presented with. Certainly, money is a problem. Certainly, we are going to have to deal with that, but in addition, massive parts of the Western part of this country are tied up in legal cases, including the entire southern California area that is tied up over litigation related to the spotted owl. This is clearly, clearly needed to address the problems that we face across the country.

I want to thank also the gentleman from California (Mr. Pombo). He recognizes very clearly the nature of this problem, and the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis), I want to congratulate him on his leadership in bringing this bill to the floor as well. He is leaving the Congress at the end of this term, and this is his signature bill. This is his legacy in the Congress. So I commend him as well.

I also commend Members who have fought against this process like the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio). They have seen the light. They understand what it takes. They understand that it is time to get about the business of solving the problem, rather than another 8 years of fighting, and I would say to those few remaining who do not understand, get on board, get this done.

Yes, there is additional work that needs to be done. Yes, we will look forward to working with them in future

Congresses, but now is the time to give the President the ability to sign a bill that will put our Forest Service to work, to get this problem underway. We will come back for additional legislation because this problem is going to persist, and this is only a beginning.

Support this conference report. It is a good one.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

No, Mr. Speaker, I am in favor of the conference report.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act conference report, and I am pleased to be here on the verge of completing legislation that will give us a chance to return America's cherished forests back to a healthy landscape. For the last century, public land managers have suppressed all forms of wildfire, including natural small-scale fires that restore forest ecosystems.

The unintended result of this policy is a decades-long buildup of forest fuel, woody biomass, and dense underbrush that is as close as the next lightning strike or escaped campfire from exploding into a massive fire. In some areas, tree density has increased from 50 trees per acre to as many as 500 trees per acre, according to the Forest Service and fire ecologists. These unnaturally dense forests are a small-scale ignition away from a large-scale wildfire. These natural small-scale fires burn at the ground level and at relatively low temperatures, allowing some trees to survive and, in the process, renewing the forest.

The suppression of these natural small-scale fires, however, has resulted in an accumulation of fuel that supports catastrophic wildfires of unnatural intensity that burn hotter, spread faster and cause long-term severe environmental damage, sometimes even sterilizing the soil. America's forest ecosystems are being decimated at an alarming rate by large-scale catastrophic wildfire and massive outbreaks of disease, insect infestation, and invasive species. Federal foresters estimate that an astounding 190 million acres of land managed by the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior are at unnatural risk to catastrophic wildfire. Of that, over 70 million acres are at extreme risk to catastrophic wildfire in the immediate future.

During the second year of the National Fire Plan implementation, we witnessed the second largest fire season this Nation has seen in half a century. An early widespread drought, unparalleled since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, affected 45 percent of the country. On June 21, 2002, the national level of readiness rose to the highest level possible, 5 weeks earlier than ever before, and remained at that level for a record- setting 62 days. In fact, wildland fires burned 7.2 million acres, or nearly double the 10-year average. Colorado, Arizona and Oregon recently recorded their largest timber fires of the century. And then we saw the devastation in Southern California.

Forest ecologists, professional land managers, and many environmental groups agree, the exploding incidence of catastrophic wildfire and disease and insect infestation pose a massive threat to the health, diversity, and sustainability of America's national forests. The Nature Conservancy, one of

the world's largest and most acclaimed environmental groups, has been a leader in the environmental community in building public awareness about the environmental calamities that catastrophic wildfires cause.

Of the three factors that most influence wildland fire behavior, weather, topography and fuel, land managers can effectively affect only fuel. Unless we take a proactive approach to fuel reduction, the remaining components of the National Fire Plan, which include firefighting, rehabilitation, community assistance and research, will only continue to increase in cost. Local governments, volunteer firefighters, professional foresters, conservationists, and labor organizations agree, it is time to act to protect our forests.

Fortunately, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act addresses these concerns by giving Federal land managers the opportunity to restore our forests to a more natural balance while maintaining important environmental requirements. The conference report before us allows for authorized hazardous fuel reduction projects on Federal lands, helps communities in the wildland-urban interface prepare for wildfires, improves the NEPA analysis process, and augments public involvement and review. Additionally, the report includes titles allowing grants to use biomass, providing watershed forestry assistance, addressing insect infestation research, and establishing private forest reserves.

In closing, let me remind Members that this is not a new issue to come before the United States Congress. We have been talking about this issue for years. I remember the tremendous work done by former House Agriculture Committee chairman Bob Smith and his efforts to reach out and find a compromise, only to go down in flames because of the inability of extreme sides of this question to come together.

I am disappointed that certain Members of the House were excluded from the process that got us here today. That certainly has not been the case with the House Committee on Agriculture. I commend Chairman Goodlatte for his bipartisanship and leadership on this important issue. We all have differing opinions about the various components of the legislation before us; but in passing this legislation, we will restore America's treasured landscapes by reducing the risks of catastrophic wildfires and insect and disease infestations.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier).

(Mr. DREIER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Smith).

(Mr. SMITH of Michigan asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to give two of my remaining minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte) for the purposes of closing.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I will yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte) if he would like to engage in a colloquy on monitoring.

I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Mr. Speaker, I will state I certainly agree with the chairman. I understand the benefit of multiparty monitoring. However, the chairman is correct in expressing that our intent with respect to projects conducted under title IV are to be scientifically conducted and multiparty monitoring is not a requirement of these projects.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to conclude by thanking all who have worked so diligently for so long to bring us to this point to where we truly have a compromise that will move our forest policy in a desirable direction.

I thank the staff, all who have worked on both sides on the aisle so diligently under somewhat trying conditions from time to time as we have had some of the internal strife that unfortunately finds its way into this House of Representatives. But that certainly has not been the case regarding

the House Committee on Agriculture, and the bipartisan support there is something that I have enjoyed and working with the chairman and the gentleman from California (Mr. Pombo) and others as we have strived to put together what is basically a good bill.

When you read the bill, much of the complaints about what we have heard today are not in the bill. If you are going to have sound forests, if you are going to have a sound forest policy, sound science, common sense has got to replace the opinions of many who have a difference of opinion regarding what is good conservation, what is good management, and how we do, in fact, manage our forests so that we do have lumber for housing and other projects.

So all in all, this is a good sound compromise worthy of overwhelming support of this body. I thank all of those who have worked on it. It certainly has been something that I personally have worked on for many, many years. I am glad to see it is getting to this point. I urge a very strong vote in favor of the project.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to vote for this conference report.

It has flaws. But if its provisions are properly implemented it can help reduce the risk of severe wildfire damage that now threatens lives and property in many communities in Colorado and other States--and for me that is the bottom line.

I am convinced we need to act to protect our communities and their water supplies. For that, a variety of things must be done, including working to reduce the built-up fuels that can increase the severity of the wildland fires that will periodically occur nearby.

That's why I have introduced legislation to expedite those thinning projects. It is also why last year I joined with my Colorado colleague, Representative McInnis, and other Members to develop a bill that was approved by the Resources Committee.

I voted for that bill last year, and if H.R. 1904 as it came to the House floor earlier this year had been the same as that bill, I would have voted for it again. But it wasn't the same bill, which was why I voted against it.

Instead of building on last year's work in the Resources Committee, the Resources and Agriculture Committees this year brought forth a quite different measure--one that added a long list of new provisions while omitting some of the key parts of last year's bill. As a result, it has taken much longer than I though it should have for us to reach the point of being ready to vote on a measure that has a good chance of clearing both chambers and being sent to the President for signing into law.

Because H.R. 1904 as passed by the House rejected key compromises that we worked our last year, the bill encountered more resistance in the Senate than otherwise would have been the case, and it was that much harder to shape compromises on a number of difficult points.

However, in the end the Senate passed a bill that made important improvements on the House version--and this conference report, while far from perfect, is itself a definite improvement over the legislation that I voted against earlier this year.

Let me briefly outline some of the ways in which the conference report is enough of an improvement over the House bill that I can and will vote for it today:

funding focus

Like the Senate bill, the conference report requires that at least 50 percent of all thinning-project funds be spent in the interface areas. Last year's Resources Committee bill would have required 70 percent of the money to be spent in the interface, but H.R. 1904 as passed by the House did not include any such requirement. So, the conference report is an improvement over the House bill in this area.

wildland/urban interface

I think the highest priority for fuel-reduction work needs to be on the forest lands where accumulated fuels present the most immediate risks to our communities--those within the wildland/urban interface, or the ``red zone,'' as it is called in Colorado--and to municipal water supplies. These are the places where forest conditions present the greatest risks to people's lives, health, and property, and so they should be where our finite resources--time, money, and people--are concentrated.

To properly focus on these areas, we have to properly identify them. In that regard, I had no quarrel with the provisions of H.R. 1904 as passed by the House. By referring to lands within either an ``interface'' or ``intermix'' community, it provided an appropriate limitation on the discretion of the agencies without drawing an arbitrary mileage line that would not appropriately reflect the reality that a community's exposure to the risk of wildfire depends on terrain, forest conditions, and other factors that can vary greatly from one place to another and over time.

However, proper focus also requires assured priority status for funds to carry out projects to protect communities and their water supplies. The bill reported by the Resources Committee last year required that at least 70 percent of the funds provided a for fuel-reduction purposes would have to be used for such projects--but no similar provision is included in H.R. 1904. I offered an amendment to restore the provision, and its absence was a major reason I voted against the House bill.

The Senate bill had a basic limit of one-half mile from a community's boundary, with some exceptions--if a larger area was identified in a community protection plan developed through a collaborative process; or if land near a community was steep; or if there was a geographical feature that would provide a firebreak within three-quarters of a mile, in which case the interface would go to that feature. The ``community protection plan'' provision was particularly good, in my opinion, because it did not require an arbitrary cutoff, and because it allowed both Federal and non-Federal land to be included. The rest of the definition was problematical.

The conference report improves somewhat on the Senate bill. It (1) retains the ``community protection plan'' part of the definition; (2) keeps the basic one-half mile limit; but (3) allows the interface to go to 1\1/2\ mile, if the slopes are steep or if there is a firebreak- feature within that distance and the lands are very susceptible to fire. Like the Senate bill, it

also defines the interface as including a route identified as necessary for escape from a threatened community.

I think it is well established that reducing the fuels closest to structures pays big dividends in terms of reduced fire risks. However, I do into favor defining the interface in terms of arbitrary lines on the map, because fires do not respect those lines and because our experience in Colorado has shown that some of the high-priority ``red zone'' areas are extensive. A prime example is the Hayman fire--it was among the largest in our State's history, but all of the lands involved were within the ``red zone'' as defined by our State Forester (a definition that is included in my bill, H.R. 1042).

Nonetheless, on balance, I think the conference report is acceptable on this point because of the emphasis that it puts on community- protection plans. This should encourage at-risk communities, like those along the Front Range, to develop protection plans and to encourage owners of non-Federal lands to join in working to reduce fire risks.