Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of Representative Tiffany's legislation, H.R. 204, the Accurately Counting Risk Elimination Solutions, or ACRES Act. This is a commonsense, good-governance bill that will bring sorely needed transparency and accountability to the misleading way our Federal land managers are tracking and reporting hazardous fuel treatments. This month, wildfires in southern California leveled entire communities and took the lives of at least 24 people. Local residents forced to flee their homes described the scene as a war zone. Unfortunately, the tragedies in southern California are just the latest consequences in what has been a historic wildfire crisis, devouring an average of 7 million acres every year for the last two decades. This alarming figure is more than double the annual losses seen during the 1990s. This worsening problem is directly linked to insufficient forest management, which has created a dangerous build-up of hazardous fuels in our forests. Despite the clear need to confront this crisis head-on, Federal land management agencies like the Forest Service are still failing to increase the pace and scale of their treatments. Alarmingly, investigative reporting from ``NBC News'' found that the Forest Service is overreporting the number of acres they treat annually by over 20 percent, but that is not all.…”