White House, logging groups make dueling pitches over budget fix

The Obama administration and the timber industry yesterday made dueling pitches to Congress on how to fix the nation's wildfire and forest health challenges, hoping to sway an influential group of senators who have pledged to tackle the problems head on this fall. Top officials from the White House and Interior and Agriculture departments sent a letter to members urging Congress to adopt the "Wildfire Disaster Funding Act," a bipartisan bill that would prevent those agencies from having to pilfer money from their non-fire programs to fight increasingly costly wildland blazes, a disruptive process known as fire "borrowing." On the other side, a coalition of timber industry groups led by the Federal Forest Resource Coalition sent a letter to Capitol Hill urging senators to pass H.R. 2647, a House-passed bill backed mostly by Republicans that would also prevent borrowing while giving the U.S. Forest Service streamlined authority to log more trees and make forests less susceptible to future wildfires.Both visions will get plenty of attention as Western senators try to hammer out a funding and management fix in time for the next wildfire season...more