Mr. Chairman, the Resilient Federal Forests Act contains many provisions that will give the Forest Service additional tools to better manage our national forests. To keep our forests healthy and productive, we must ensure we have skilled…
Mr. Chairman, the Resilient Federal Forests Act contains many provisions that will give the Forest Service additional tools to better manage our national forests.
To keep our forests healthy and productive, we must ensure we have skilled loggers to safely work in those forests. I thank Representative Westerman for including my bill, the Future Logging Careers Act, in his bill that is on the floor today.
My bill will allow 16- and 17-year-olds to learn the logging business by working in family-owned mechanized logging operations under the supervision of their parents. That will allow the next generation of loggers to learn valuable skills, prepare to take over family businesses, and provide the wood products needed to support our economy.
I learned of the need for this bill after meeting two Idaho loggers from third-generation logging families, Tim Christopherson from Idaho County and Tom Mahon from Adams County.
Mahon's 16-year-old son, J.T., was working under his father's supervision when a Forest Service employee sent him home. J.T. couldn't work in the woods because logging doesn't have an exemption that has long been enjoyed by family farms under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
With help from the families and the Associated Logging Contractors of Idaho, we crafted a solution that is good for families, good for rural America, and good for the American economy.
I am grateful for the bipartisan effort on this legislation, and I urge my colleagues to support the bill.
Mr. Chairman, I include in the Record a letter from the National Wild Turkey Federation and a letter from the National Association of Counties, Western Interstate Region, in support of H.R. 2936.
National Wild Turkey Federation,
Edgefield, SC, June 26, 2017.
Hon. Rob Bishop,
Chairman, Natural Resources Committee,
House of Representatives, Washington, DC.
Hon. Raul Grijalva,
Ranking Democrat, Natural Resources Committee, House of
Representatives, Washington, DC.
Dear Chairman Bishop and Representative Grijalva: On behalf
of the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) and its 230,000
members, we urge you to take swift Committee action on H.R.
2936 the Resilient Federal Forest Act of 2017. The NWTF is a
leader in wildlife habitat conservation in North America and
is dedicated to the conservation of the wild turkey and
preservation of our hunting heritage. We are currently
working towards our 10-year Save the Habitat. Save the Hunt
initiative in which we aim to conserve or enhance 4 million
acres of critical habitat, recruit 1.5 million hunters and
open 500,000 acres for outdoor enjoyment
Active forest management is crucial to establishing healthy
and sustainable forests and decisions for forest management
should be based on sound science. As such, the common sense
solutions offered in H.R. 2936 are imperative to the health
and future of our nation's forests and important to the NWTF
to help achieve our objectives. In total, H.R. 2936 has many
reasonable solutions to the challenges that the managing
agencies face to increase the pace and efficiency of active
forest management on our nation's federal lands. We take this
opportunity to highlight those solutions that we believe will
make the most immediate difference and offer recommendations
as to how we believe the bill can be further improved.
We support increased availability for Categorical
Exclusions (CE) in order to deal more effectively and
efficiently with threats like pests and disease and for
addressing urgent wildlife needs like critical habitat for
endangered species. We are especially supportive of the CE
that will allow for activities that enhance early
successional forests for wildlife habitat. Unlike some
critics of CEs who will suggest, they do not exempt the
action from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),
rather they apply the NEPA review to like or similar actions
to expedite the process. These are administered under Council
on Environmental Quality regulations and other guidance.
Increased use of CEs is one of the best opportunities we have
in the short term to increase the pace of active forest
management.
Funding the cost of fighting catastrophic wildfires outside
of the agency budget is paramount to the agency's ability to
deliver on other aspects of their mission. We are supportive
of a fix that will allow catastrophic wildfires to be
considered a disaster. Until agencies are freed from the
burden of fighting catastrophic wildfires through their
annual budgets we will be unable to make meaningful progress
towards proactive forest management. We recommend capping the
firefighting budget at the current 10-year average to protect
further erosion of the U.S. Forest Service budget in other
important mission delivery areas.
We support the bill's provisions for large scale
reforestation on fire-impacted lands. While public input and
review is essential to public lands management, currently it
can result in delayed action and result in an inability to
accomplish the necessary objectives. We believe the deadlines
set for plan development and public input, as well as the
prohibition on restraining orders and preliminary injunctions
strike a reasonable balance. We recommend that this provision
of the bill clarify that proper ecological restoration is
allowed as a mechanism to salvage forests post catastrophic
events as reforestation may not always be the best action for
the ecological good.
The NWTF strongly supports arbitration as an alternative to
litigation. This will conserve valuable U.S. Forest Service
resources and expedite work getting done on the ground.
Additionally, we support the provision that does not allow
plaintiffs challenging a forest management activity to
receive any award or payment obligated from the Claims and
Judgment Fund.
We support the approach for allowing evaluation of only
action/no-action alternatives for collaborative Forest Plans,
Resource Advisory Committee and Community Wildfire Protection
Plan projects. Limiting the number of alternatives will
expedite the development of environmental assessments and
allow work to get done on the ground more quickly. We also
support the requirement to look at consequences of a no-
action alternative as a no-action decision would still have
an impact on the resource.
We understand budget concerns counties face and are
supportive of a portion of retained receipts from stewardship
contracts going to the counties. Stewardship Contracting is
an important tool for active forest management. Ultimately
this change will remove one impediment to utilizing
Stewardship Contracting and help garner support from the
counties. We recommend modifying this section to reflect that
payment should come only from retained receipts on completed
projects, versus strictly from timber value within ongoing
projects. This will maintain the ``exchange of goods for
services'' function of Stewardship Contracting while also
preserving the balance of timber dollars and the investment
of matching funds from organizations like the NWTF to expand
the scope and scale of projects, thus accomplishing more
active management and fire protection across the landscape
and within counties.
We appreciate the recognition of the importance of funding
planning activities for forest management. We are concerned
that the provision could potentially provide justification
for the U.S. Forest Service staff to refrain from fully
utilizing product value and
partner match dollars for on the ground work. While we feel
the 25% threshold is too high, the provision of allowing some
of the stewardship project revenues to cover the costs of
planning additional projects could be beneficial and
incentivize project planning.
We also appreciate the common-sense amendments to the
Endangered Species Act (ESA) that will improve the process of
protecting endangered and threatened species and their
habitat. The bill overturns the ``Cottonwood'' court
decision, which directs that if additional critical habitat
is designated under an approved Forest Plan or Resource
Management Plan, a section 7 programmatic re-consultation of
the entire Forest Plan needs to be done. The U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service and the Obama Administration argued that the
section 7 consultation needs only to be done on the portion
of the project covering the additionally designated acreage
of critical habitat. The remedy in this bill will greatly
reduce the debilitating process that the federal court
decision directs. The bill also affirms current U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service policy that no ESA section 7 consultation is
required if the U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land
Management determines through informal consultation that the
proposed action will not likely have an adverse affect on
species or critical habitat. We further support the 90 day
threshold on a CE established by this bill because it will
conserve agency resources and expedite management activities
on the ground.
We commend Congressman Westerman, the co-sponsors, and
Chairman Bishop for their dedication to restoring and
maintaining our federal forests under management informed by
science, and offering the appropriate reforms to management
practices. We respectfully urge that you expeditiously report
H.R. 2936 out of Committee and to the House floor.
Sincerely,
Rebecca A. Humphries,
Chief Executive Officer.
