Forest
measure will touch nation from coast to coast
By
Gary Harmon
gharmon@gjds.com
Cox
News Service
GRAND
JUNCTION, Colo. -- The Healthy Forests Restoration Act signed into
law Wednesday by President Bush gives the signal to federal land
managers across the country -- from the tinder-dry West to the
beetle-infested South -- to prepare treatment plans.
The new law calls on federal land managers to clear 20 million of
the nation's 190 million woodland acres deemed to be in most danger
of catastrophic wildfires.
The selection process will be a "bottom-up kind of thing"
from communities and land managers with the U.S. Forest Service and
Bureau of Land Management, said Mark Rey, undersecretary for natural
resources and environment in the Agriculture Department, the
administration's most senior forest-policy post.
Project selection can be done "fairly quickly" and in time
for summer, when the work would have to be done.
Many of the steps already are outlined in the national fire plan, he
said.
Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo said he expected that
congressional representatives also would weigh in on behalf of their
districts, but that final decisions would remain "with the
people on the ground" because politicians and high-level
bureaucrats "have been messing this thing up for a long
time."
While officials in the West scramble to prepare projects for dry
forests, officials in the South can use separate authority in the
same measure to attack beetle kill on those lands, Rey said.
The Chattahoochee-Oconee national forests in
Georgia
, with patches of beetle kill, would prime candidates for treatment
projects under the bill, he said.
Beetle-kill treatments wouldn't count under the bill's 20 million
acres for wildfire protection, he said.
The 20 million acres is just a starting point, Rey said, a
"target to hit showing we can do a good job and if we succeed
in showing Congress that -- we could then go do it on another 20
(million acres)."
A critic of the measure, Udi Lazimy of the American Lands Alliance,
said the changes take the public out of the process and "You
can't exactly operate from the 'bottom-up' without the public's full
involvement. It is, after all, our public land for which we pay
taxes to enjoy and preserve."
Treatment priorities will center first on the so-called wildland-urban
interface, where forests and communities or homes intermingle. The
measure authorizes $760 million a year for thinning projects on the
20 million acres -- a $340 million increase.
Watershed projects would be next in line, said Rep. Scott McInnis,
R-Colo., author of the bill, who said significant damage was done to
the Denver-area watershed last year by the destructive Hayman fire.
It will take years to restore that watershed, which was left looking
"like chocolate milk with logs floating in it," he said.
As for the national fire plan, Lazimy said, federal agencies have
prioritized treatments with little relation to communities at risk.
Fire-plan funding in 2002 resulted in more than 133,000 acres of
treatment outside the wildland-urban interface in
Colorado
,
Wyoming
, and
New Mexico
, nearly three times the number of acres treated on federal property
adjoining private, state, and tribal lands, he said.
When McInnis first announced his measure, he said it also would
include forest-stewardship programs and initiatives for using
undergrowth with no commercial value as biomass to generate energy.
The stewardship portion of the bill passed Congress already in a
different bill and the administration is already writing stewardship
contracts in
New Mexico
, Rey said.
The biomass portion was written into both the healthy forests and
energy bill with the idea that it would be kept in the first bill to
emerge from conference committees.
The energy bill was first out of conference, "so we dropped
ours" from the forest bill, Rey said. "Little did we know
energy wouldn't go and we did. We probably outsmarted
ourselves."
McInnis was the driving force to get the bill through, Rey said, and
"distinguished himself as a legislator this session in a way
the Western Slope hasn't seen since the days of Wayne Aspinall."
Gary Harmon writes for The (
Grand Junction
,
Colo.
) Daily Sentinel.
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