Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOSAR. Mr. Chairman, I thank Chairman Hastings for the time, for his leadership on our committee, and for including my bipartisan wildfire legislation--the Catastrophic Wildfire Prevention Act--in this forest health package.

Mr. Chairman, we have a forest health crisis in this country, and this bill will go a long way toward restoring the environment, improving public safety, and putting thousands of people back to work.

Due to redistricting, I have represented nearly all of rural Arizona in Congress--nearly 48,000 square miles of U.S. Forest Service land. These areas have been some of the communities most devastated by recent wildfire. In my first year, the Wallow Fire, now the largest fire in Arizona's State history, ravaged half a million acres of our treasured Ponderosa Pine Country in just a few weeks; and this year, our State was struck by the recent loss of 19 firefighters in the Yarnell Hill Fire. That fire was one of many to burn over 103,000 acres this year.

We must come together, change the status quo, and facilitate conditions that minimize the chance that fires start, and we must reduce their size and intensity once they burn. The bill before us today does a few important things to achieve that goal:

First, it prioritizes responsible timber production, and it ensures a reliable revenue stream for local governments. The Feds made a promise to our forest communities, and it must uphold that promise. Secure Rural School dollars ensure our counties can provide essential services, such as public safety and education to our constituents. H.R. 1526 would not only provide certainty in the program, but it would increase timber revenues threefold;

Secondly, it implements my bill, the Catastrophic Wildfire Prevention Act. These provisions, parts of title II and title V of the act, reduce red tape and provide the land management agencies a variety of tools, specifically stewardship contracting and good neighbor authority, to conduct smaller projects in high-risk areas that need immediate attention.

While long-term, active forest management will protect our communities in the long run, we have to protect our people and our assets today. These provide an expedited arrangement to streamline thinning and grazing projects needed in immediate, at-risk areas like our forest communities, critical water delivery and electrical infrastructures, and our schools.

The solutions in our bill are supported by nearly every county in my rural district, in particular Yavapai and Gila Counties, and many affected stakeholders, including the Cattlemen, the Natural Resources Conservation Districts, and the Farm Bureau. This bill has commonsense solutions to our forest health crisis that should garner the entire support of this body.

You may look at this bill and think it's not perfect, but it will do a lot to prevent the suffering that communities like the ones I represent have been experiencing. I would welcome any Member of this body to come down to my district and meet with the families who have lost their homes, their fathers, their mothers, their husbands and wives, their kids, and their livelihoods. I think you will see why we have to act.

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