Here’s a link to a story on a House Bill from the Durango Herald. Italics are mine.
Grijalva predicted the Democratic-controlled Senate will not go for the bill.
“Why not craft something that would be taken seriously?” he said.
Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said members of Congress from the American West in the two parties have a lot of common ground on the forest-health problem, but Tipton’s bill goes too far. In any case, the real problem is prying money from Congress and the White House in order to fund forest-thinning projects, he said.
“Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have come up short in funding hazardous fuel-reduction treatments,” DeFazio said.
The bill’s number is H.R. 1526. Wednesday’s vote puts it in line for a vote on the House floor after Congress returns from its August recess.
Tipton urged quick passage.
Did you really say this?
Please Representative DeFazio, say it ain’t so.
Seems like a long term commitment to a sustained harvest level sufficient to profitably carry out sound forest management would go a very long way towards eliminating the need for “prying money from Congress and the White House in order to fund forest-thinning projects”
DeFazio has been inept on forestry issues since he was first elected. This is how he sees forestry working: “prying” hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers (“Congress and the President”), and then doing goofy make work projects as the way to get forest processing communities off the dole. In addition to being ineffective in almost every thing he tries to do in this regard, the problem is intensified because the man is clueless about forestry — other than a “buzz word” that might get him some more votes in the next election.
When I tried to help with a few projects he was dealing with five or six years ago, he preferred instead to have his “forestry advisor” (or some such), Susan Jane Brown draft the documents because “she was familiar with the issues” and because “she’s a lawyer and understands how these things are written.” She was also an anti-logging environmental activist who — while finishing her degree in Portland — spear-headed successful efforts to stop logging on Mt. Hood National Forests and to stop logging on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. All at enormous costs to taxpayers and ruinous decisions for our forests. After leaving DeFazio she went to work suing the government via a legal organization mostly devoted to that process. Lately she has spear-headed a “collaborative” drive to do millions of dollars of leaf-raking (“restoration”) on the Umatilla National Forest, 300 miles away in NE Oregon. Apparently there is more than one way to skin a cat (suck up taxpayer resources), and she seems to be a master of the process.
Gil: the agenda for these people is taking control of our public lands and resources, and they have been very successful in that regard. None of them seems to have the slightest clue — or are adamantly against contradictory opinions — regarding the fact that forest restoration, at the proper scale, would produce thousands of taxpaying jobs and return millions of dollars to our state and federal treasuries. Then we wouldn’t need these guys to go whining to Congress every year to get on the dole without actually every having to perform meaningful work. Which should have been started the first time it became obvious that the plan for NW Forests has been a blatant failure at a very high cost. When and how to stop the bleeding? DeFazio is now an important chair in the committee goer industry, and has never demonstrated an ability to get anything done.