Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Healthy forest bill gains some momentum

Two Colorado county commissioners testified Thursday in favor of U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton’s Healthy Forest Management and Wildfire Prevention Act at a House subcommittee hearing. The bill would increase state control over forest management on federal lands and allow governors to designate areas as “high risk” and take collaborative action with federal officials to prevent wildfires. Tipton, R-Cortez, introduced the bill in the 112th Congress in July, but it died without coming to the House floor for a vote. Tipton reintroduced it in this Congress, the 113th. On Thursday, the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation cleared the bill to make its way to the full House Natural Resources Committee for markup. “This bill allows those who are most directly impacted by wildfire to take proactive measures to be able to address the problem and mitigate the root causes of catastrophic wildfire,” Tipton said at the hearing. “The status quo is no longer good enough. The status quo has given us decades of declining forest health. The status quo has given us years of increasingly catastrophic wildfires. The status quo puts people, communities and the ecosystems at risk.” More than 9.3 million acres of land burned last year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center...more

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