Resilient Federal Forests Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about something that is positive that this body has done recently, something that is good for America and something that is good for our environment and good for our citizens. What I am talking about is the passage of the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is good for trees. When we have healthy trees and when we have a healthy forest, then we also have better air quality; we have better water quality; we have better wildlife habitat; we have less fire danger; we protect private property and public property, and it is a win-win-win situation for our treasured natural resource of our Federal forest. It is a winning situation for America, as we are good stewards and we conserve this valuable resource that we have.

Now, what this bill does is it allows us to actively manage our forests. We have qualified personnel in our Forest Service, people who are trained as foresters, people who have the expertise and the experience to manage these forests in a sustainable way; yet our forest managers' hands have been tied in previous years.

They have been working hard with local constituents, local stakeholders in these collaborative efforts to come up with forest plans, forest management plans, so that they can manage the forests in a way that is good for the local economy, in a way that is good for the wildlife in the forest, in a way that is good for the health of the forest; yet these forest management plans have been held up through frivolous lawsuits from outside groups, sometimes as far as a thousand miles away that file a suit against these plans.

They hold them up in court, and at the end of the day, the forest is not managed properly. Because of this, we have seen an increasing amount of forest fires over the past several decades.

Because of these increased forest fires, we are destroying our valuable natural resource. Not only are we destroying our resource, we are destroying our budget for the Forest Service. Currently, the single greatest cost to the Forest Service is fire suppression, and the next cost is litigation, and where the cost should be, in the management and health of the forest, comes in third.

What the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015 would do, it would take the focus off of fire suppression and put that focus on fire prevention. These are forestry practices that I have seen carried out in my home State of Arkansas.

In my district, the Fourth District, I have approximately 2.5 million acres of Federal forest inside my district, on the Ouachita National Forest, on the Ozark National Forest, and also in four different U.S. Fish and Wildlife service areas.

Fortunately, in Arkansas, we have been able to manage these forests in a way that is good for the forest. A lot of this was done in an effort to protect an endangered species, the red-cockaded woodpecker. What our Forest Service employees have done is they have gone into the forests, they have assessed it, and they determined what would create the best habitat for this endangered species. They found that a habitat with an open understory, one which has large nesting trees for the woodpecker, is great habitat for the woodpecker.

They implemented a plan to go in and thin the forest--not clear-cut it, but thin it--and then develop a fire regime to keep the underbrush out. You might think that thinning the forest and burning the forest would cause a decrease in biodiversity, but our foresters saw something quite the opposite. Our forests in Arkansas were much like the ones across the country, many forests out West. They had been cut as much as a century ago and allowed just to grow back with the only management being putting the fires out when they start.

What happens in a situation like this is forests are dynamic; they continue to grow until they fill up all the growing space, and then they start competing with one another. When they compete with one another, they get weak; they are subject to insect and disease attack.

You get more fuel that falls on to the forest floor, creating a fuel load; you get dead and weakened timber, and you get a lightning strike, and it burns the whole forest down.

When you manage the forest, when you thin it and you use controlled burns, you open up the canopy; you open up the forest floor, and you see a flush of fauna, and you see biodiversity increase tremendously.

At the same time as the biodiversity and plant life increases, you get a flush in wildlife. On these plots in Arkansas, not only did we see an increase in numbers in red-cockaded woodpecker, we saw an increase in the bobwhite quail, in wild turkeys, in deer, in several other songbird species.

This management scheme is good for the forest; it is good for the wildlife; it creates cleaner air; it creates cleaner water. Again, it is a win-win situation. By applying these management practices--and they will be different as you go across the country in different regions.

As we let the local professionals and the local stakeholders manage the forests the way it was intended to be managed, we will create a healthy forest, which is good for all the local communities where these forests are located.

Another thing that we have done in this bill is we strengthened the secure rural schools provisions. We stipulate that 25 percent of funding has to go into local counties to provide emergency services to fund schools. This is critical for these local communities where forest activities around the national forests have greatly decreased over the past several decades.

We used to cut nearly 12 billion board feet of timber off of the forests. Now, we are down to less than 3 billion board feet per year. Many of these local economies depended on those forests. As we quit cutting timber and the infrastructure to process the timber left, these communities suffered all across our country where these natural forests are located.

This bill will allow funding to go to these communities, so that they continue to provide emergency services, so they can continue to provide funds for education and help to grow the communities.

Another provision in this bill is it allows the salvaging of timber after a catastrophic event. Now, a clear cut actually mimics a wildfire in the forest; so when you have a wildfire that is a stand-replacing fire, it causes the damage when the fire occurs.

In forestry terms, the land is essentially being clear-cut when the fire happens, but you will still have dead standing trees. These trees need to be salvaged. They have value, value that can be extracted and used to reforest the land, value that not only creates value in reforestation, it also cleans up the land, so you can reforest it and prevent future fire dangers.

What has happened in the past is the salvage cuts have been held up in court again, and you get standing dead timber that, the next time a fire comes through, it makes it dangerous for our firefighters to go in and fight the fire.

What this bill does is it still requires an environmental assessment of the area, but it speeds the process in that, and it prevents injunctions from allowing these salvage cuts so that this timber can be salvaged, and the revenue is used to go back into the Forest Service to reforest these lands and, again, provide the management practices to have healthy forests.

What happens now is we see, after a catastrophic event, we get only 3 percent of regeneration or reforestation of the land. This bill requires that, after the catastrophic event, we have to have 75 percent reforestation after a period of 5 years.

The 5-year timeframe gives foresters time to come in and assess the efforts that they put forth and to correct any problems that they have had in restoring these forests.

This bill, again, is very critical and very much needed. It has the support of, I believe, 117 different organizations, from wildlife groups, from environmental groups, many tribes across the country, many county governments. People recognize the benefits of this bill and the benefits that can come to our country if we enact this legislation.

Unfortunately, the bill is held up in the Senate right now, and as the fire season increases out West and we see more and more of our natural treasure and our Federal forests going up in flames, it should become more imperative for the Senate to take up this bill and pass it and for the President to sign it into law.

As I have stated in committee hearings when we were pushing this bill through, the forests don't really pay attention to what we legislate here in Washington, D.C.

They are dynamic, living organisms. They continue to grow. They continue to fill up the growing space. They are more reactive to what happens in nature.

We need to be proactive in managing these forests--managing them to be healthy, managing them to be more resistant to wildfire and inspects and diseases. I call on the Senate and the President to take up this legislation, to pass it, and to move America forward with healthy forests.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Newhouse).

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would also like to talk about some other positive things that this body has done here, as we approach the August break. This has to do with the VA.

Since the wait list manipulation scandal was brought to the public's attention last year, Americans have become all too familiar with incompetence and misconduct at the Federal agency charged with helping our veterans.

The House Veterans' Affairs Committee has held dozens of hearings; the head of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs resigned under congressional pressure; and Congress has enacted major reform legislation.

The Veterans' Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act created a 3-year program to allow veterans to seek care from private providers if they live too far from a VA facility or cannot otherwise get an appointment within 14 days. It also gave the VA Secretary the authority to fire senior executives for poor performance and required a top-to-bottom study of the entire Department to be completed within 1 year of enactment.

However, even with this oversight, the Obama administration has failed to correct the problems. We continue to hear about unacceptable patient wait times, unanswered benefit inquiries, patient safety concerns, medical malpractice, flagrant mismanagement, infighting, corruption, and years of construction delays that total millions of dollars.

When government failure is exposed and legislation aimed at restoring accountability is enacted, it makes sense that action would be swift and immediate: people would be fired; wrongs would begin to be made right. Unfortunately, that has not been the case at the Department of Veterans Affairs. While there are as many as 1,000 employees that could potentially face disciplinary actions, the VA has only fired three people for involvement in the scandal.

Our veterans have earned our respect, and they shouldn't have to wait in line for months or years just to see a doctor. New documents show that one out of every three waiting for care at the VA has already died, and recent reports reveal there are now 50 percent more veterans on wait lists for a month or longer than last summer.

When our brave servicemembers come home, we have to keep our word to them by modernizing our VA system to deliver the best care in the world. In the 114th Congress, House Republicans have passed numerous pieces of legislation designed to help veterans and increase accountability at the VA.

In February, the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act was signed into law and provides veterans with access to the mental healthcare resources they need.

Last week, the House passed the Veterans Information

Modernization Act, which would give Congress and the public access to key data regarding the delivery of health care, medical services, and nursing home care by the VA healthcare system.

Many veterans have contacted us expressing their frustration at having to carry official Department of Defense discharge papers to prove their military service, and last week, legislation was signed into law to create an official identification card for veterans.

Just this week, we have passed the VA Accountability Act, which would provide the VA Secretary with increased flexibility in removing employees who fail our veterans; the Hire More Heroes Act, which would make it easier to hire veterans by exempting those who already have health insurance from being counted as full-time employees under ObamaCare; the Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act, which would provide an annual cost-of-living adjustment for veterans receiving disability compensation; and the Ruth Moore Act, which would update regulations for veterans seeking financial compensation for mental health conditions linked to sexual assault while they were serving in the military.

The House also had to pass legislation that included provisions to allow the VA to transfer funds within its budget to cover an unexpected $2.5 billion shortfall in hospital and medical care accounts. Without this fix, the agency said it would start shutting down hospital operations in August.

It is critically important that we take care of those who have sacrificed so much in service to our country. This week, Congress has continued its efforts to meet our responsibility to America's veterans. However, we cannot transform the VA alone. It is the President's responsibility to ensure changes are made within the agency and employees are held accountable for their actions.

America's veterans deserve a meaningful, decisive plan to right the many wrongs that have been committed. It is past time for the Obama administration to change the culture at the VA and end this agencywide pattern of misconduct and neglect.

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

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