Bruce Westerman: “I would like to first thank my colleague from California, Representative Panetta, for his cosponsorship of this…”

“I would like to first thank my colleague from California, Representative Panetta, for his cosponsorship of this bipartisan amendment. I also would like to thank Representative McCollum from Minnesota for her support of this amendment. Madam Chair, this amendment simply adds $10 million to the State and private forestry fund. The purpose of this is to prevent some of these catastrophic wildfires that we have been seeing over the past few years. What we have here is a map that shows what the Forest Service has delineated as a wildland-urban interface. This is where forestry and urban areas intersect, and this is where we have potential for significant loss of property and lives. There are already programs in place to manage these wildland-urban interfaces, and what we hope to do with this additional appropriation is just to help the State forestry units manage these areas better. We talk a lot in Congress about Federal lands and how we need to manage those, but across the country, over half of all forestland is owned by private forest landowners. There are literally millions of these private forest landowners, many of them on very small parcels of forestland, and they have no incentive to manage them to help stop the spread of catastrophic wildfire.…”