Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008
Floor Speech
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - June 26, 2007)
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Mr. YOUNG of Alaska. Mr. Chairman, speaking to my point of order, this amendment constitutes legislation on an appropriations bill in violation of clause 2(c) of rule XXI because it will impose substantial new duties on the Secretary of Agriculture. Under Deschler's Precedents, volume 8, chapter 26, section 50, where an amendment seeks to impose on a Federal official substantial duties that are different from or in addition to those already contemplated in law, then it is considered legislative in nature and violates clause 2(c) of rule XXI.
Moreover, under Deschler's Precedents, volume 8, chapter 26, section 52, even though a limitation or exception therefrom might refrain from explicitly assigning new duties to officers of the government, if it implicitly requires them to make investigations, compile evidence or make judgments or determinations not otherwise required of them by law, then it assumes the character of legislation and is subject to a point of order under clause 2(c) of rule XXI.
This amendment will require the Secretary of Agriculture to make investigations and compile evidence not otherwise required under existing law, as well as make a substantive determination not required by any law applicable to his authority. See 8 Deschler's Precedents, chapter 26, section 52.38.
The amendment bars planning and studying of certain roads, those used for timber harvesting by individuals or private entities in the Tongass National Forest. Roads used for other purposes and by other entities are not affected. In addition, the amendment bars the use of funds to ``construct'' such a road. Under volume 23 of the U.S. Code, section 101(a)(c), ``construction'' is defined to include reconstruction of roads. This definition is reflected in the Forest Service budget, which differentiates between construction/reconstruction of roads and maintenance of roads. This is also reflected in the road provisions affecting all roads, including those in the Tongass National Forest. I cite pages 7-36, 7-33 and 4-115, ``Road and Bridge Construction/Reconstruction,'' of the draft proposed Tongass Forest Plan relating to roads to reflect this understanding. Therefore, this amendment will apply to not only proposed roads but also to the 3,653 miles of permanent roads already in the Tongass National Forest. Some of these roads are not currently used for timber harvesting but could be in the future.
Under the National Forests Roads and Trails Act (16 U.S.C. 532-538), the U.S. Forest Service constructs forest development roads ``within and near'' national forests that ``will permit maximum economy in harvesting timber from such lands tributary to such roads and at the same time meet the requirements for protection, development and management thereof, and for the utilization of the other resources thereof.''
Under the current Forest Service Transportation Planning Handbook and the Tongass Forest Plan, the Secretary does not identify or track roads by the character of their use nor is such a determination required for reconstruction of existing roads. A road in a national forest may have multiple purposes, including recreation access, subsistence hunting access, vehicle use for emergencies, travel routes, utility maintenance or egress to Forest Service ranger stations or other structures.
Moreover, a road could be used for timbering operations by multiple participants, including the Forest Service itself, the State of Alaska, local governments, mining corporations with mining permits, private contractors or Native Alaskan tribal entities. According to the Forest Service, these landowners take between 80 million and 100 million board feet of timber from their lands in a year.
Some of these users would not be barred by the Chabot amendment. No current law requires the Secretary to differentiate between users of Forest Service roads. In support of this assertion, I quote from a recent letter from Under Secretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and the Environment: ``Because the Forest Service does not distinguish roads on the basis of who uses them, implementation of the proposed Chabot amendment on the Tongass National Forest would require new processes, policies and additional work to ensure that, if the Forest Service is spending funding on roads, such roads are not utilized by individuals or private entities in support of harvesting timber on Federal or nonFederal lands.''
Under the terms of the amendment, the Forest Service would have to make an initial determination that the road proposed for construction or reconstruction would not be used for impermissible uses by impermissible people. For existing roads proposed for reconstruction, this would mean first monitoring the road to see how it is used and by whom over some period of time.
In addition, the Secretary would also have to monitor and enforce compliance with the limitation after the road is built or reconstructed. Enforcing this restriction would be burdensome. The Tongass National Forest, and the Nation's largest public forest, is 16.7 million acres, approximately the size of the State of West Virginia. It is comprised of scattered lands located along the mountains of Alaska's southeastern coast, and portions are remote and difficult to get to.
Within the forest are approximately 128,000 acres of State, Alaska Native Corporation and private land are accessed only through the Tongass National Forest roads. According to the Forest Service, 3,653 miles of permanent miles of roads have been constructed in the Forest, and these roads are used for travel, forest management, recreation, subsistence access, remote community connections, as well as the timber harvest.
Only 570 Forest Service personnel are assigned to the forest, one employee for every 45,000 acres. The majority of these employees do office work and are not out in the field, so the Secretary would have to make substantial hires and reassign these personnel to patrol roads. I cite eight Deschler's Precedents, Chapter 26, section 52.22 regarding the imposition of duty to monitor actions of recipients as transforming a limitation amendment into legislation.
For those reasons, I ask you to sustain my point of order.
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Mr. YOUNG of Alaska. Mr. Chairman, I first want to compliment the gentleman from New Jersey, and the gentleman, Mr. Chabot, of Ohio. This was sprung on me 2 years ago, and I was quite upset, and I'm still upset, but you are being gentlemen about it.
I will return that favor. Last time, it was very unhappy and very ugly.
But, again, I urge my colleagues to vote against this. Let's be clear about this amendment. This amendment is not about fiscal responsibility, in all due respects. It's a giveaway to the radical and environmental groups that want to treat the Tongass and all southeast Alaska as their taxpayer subsidized playground.
The problem with the timber harvest program is that environmental groups have purposely driven up the costs of managing it by filing multiple, multiple frivolous lawsuits and appeals. Now that they have successfully created the problem, they're offering a solution: target a Member of Congress unfamiliar with Alaska and the Tongass, and express concern that the Tongass timber program has become uneconomical and should not be funded by the taxpayer, request that they offer an amendment, threaten Members with negative score on their annual report cards for failing to support the amendment.
This is like a personal injury lawyer who sues lawyers over living, and then complains to Congress about the high cost of medical care. As long as you are talking about taxpayer dollars and fiscal conservatism, it should be noted that the lawsuits and appeals responsible for the high cost of doing business in the Tongass are all funded by the American taxpayer under the Equal Access to Justice Act, which says if you are an environmental fundraising group in the ninth circuit, you file lawsuits by piece work and get your money back for every one you file.
This is the ``taxpayer waste'' we should be discussing here today, taxpayers waste. If not for the never-ending onslaught of frivolous, taxpayer-funded lawsuits and appeals, the U.S. Forest Service could be managing a timber program at a net profit.
In addition to putting a Federal stamp of approval on these groups' antics, a ``yes'' vote on this amendment will cripple what's left, what's left of the several hundred Alaskan jobs. At one time, I had 15,000 jobs in my State that's been taken away. You have outsourced them.
The timber industry supports the best-paying year-found jobs in southeast Alaska, or they did. Even though environmentalists have already succeeded locking up over 96 percent of the Tongass, and eliminating most of these jobs, they are now after the remaining 4 percent, the last few hundred jobs, 15,000 versus 400, and this is America? This is nothing economic. This is economic terrorism. What's worse, the American taxpayer has been paying for it.
If supporters of this amendment would like to join me in restricting the frivolous timber appeals and lawsuits filed by the environmental trial lawyers against every timber sale and every road in the Tongass, we could lower the cost of timber harvest and return the profit to the taxpayer.
Very frankly, I believe this amendment is a job-killing bill, supposedly protecting taxpayers, but it's about fooling them. It's about forcing my constituents out of work and removing people from the Tongass so the environmentalists have a 17 million acre taxpayer subsidized playground for themselves.
I want to remind people, I have been through this in 1980. This Congress took away 16.5 million acres of Tongass. They took it all away but 10 percent. We were told there would be peace in the valley, yet same groups, same trial lawyers, same environmental groups are trying to take that last 4 percent away, 400 jobs, out the drain.
Each one of you were talking about how bad the economy is in the United States, how you outsourced your jobs, you and your industrial States, and yet you are doing this to the State of Alaska, the jobs that Alaskans have. It's a disservice to this body to continue to pander to a group that knows nothing about it other than the fact they want their playground. It's the wrong thing to do to us.
I know the why the two gentlemen are introducing this amendment. I understand it. But think of what you are doing to your Americans. The workers are left. Let us manage the timber. We would have had a profitable area, but asked by your supporters of this amendment have stopped our ability to manage the forest in a profitable way and driven those jobs overseas, into Canada, into South America, where they defoliated the forests.
We have done a disservice to a renewable resource, a terrible disservice to a renewable resource. This Congress has not managed its force, because they want to supposedly protect the trees, and those trees are dead trees, my good friends, they are dead. They should be harvested.
All I am asking is not to impose this on them so we can get that little, final 4 percent available for the Alaskan workers and for this Nation. That's not asking much. I am urging my colleagues to vote, very strongly, a no on this amendment. It's the wrong thing to do. It's the wrong thing to do for this Nation, wrong thing to do for the State of Alaska, but it's the wrong thing to do for the Americans of this great Nation.
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Mr. YOUNG of Alaska. I thank the gentleman for his comments.
I would ask the authors of this amendment if they would respond to the question.
Will you respond, Mr. Chabot and Mr. Andrews?
I am going to introduce legislation to allow the forest to be sold to the State of Alaska. If you are fiscally conservative, we will raise about $4.5 billion, we will pay you for it.
Then we can manage it as we should manage it, because right now it's not being managed. When I introduce that bill, are you willing to get on my bill to sell that forest to the State of Alaska so we could manage it as it should be managed.
Would you be willing to sponsor that bill?
Mr. ANDREWS. If the gentleman would yield, I, of course, could not commit to a bill I haven't read. But I will say this. If there are sound management environment principles, it's an issue I'd have to take under consideration.
Mr. YOUNG of Alaska. I appreciate that because it's very simple to say the Tongass will be sold at fair market value to the State of Alaska. And I think that would solve our problem.
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Mr. YOUNG of Alaska. Again, I just hope you understand, this is a national forest. It only has 4 percent available. A national forest that has 4 percent. And the gentleman, the ranking member, has mentioned the fact that there's no $40 million being spent.
And by the way, this is on national land because the comment was made about the roads could be built by the persons that's doing the logging. That's true. But if it's built by that person, those roads are no longer available to the general public. And what has happened, we've built a network of roads on Prince Wales Island primarily that provide, for all the local communities, communications capability that tie in with the ferries. Those roads still belong to the United States, just not the State of Alaska. They're part of the United States road system.
And so I'm just suggesting that these roads, if it was done by just a contractor, then that right wouldn't be there. Those roads would have to be pulled up, put to rest back to the original contour.
So, again, I know who's asking you to do this. I understand it. But it's really being a little disingenuous. In fact, the roads themselves are in a different area that was on private land. This is on Federal land, not private land.
And so I respectfully again ask for a ``no'' vote on this amendment because it's the wrong thing to do for the State of Alaska and for the United States.
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