Political Quotes

“I rise today to offer an amendment to H.R. 2584, the Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2012. This summer, over a million acres of Forest Service lands, as well as another 600,000 acres of Federal, State, and private lands, burned throughout the American Southwest. Those fires are costing millions of taxpayer dollars and immediate fire response, and will cost many millions more in restoration and rehabilitation in the months and years ahead. These fires reinforce the urgent need for landscape-scale restoration. My amendment ensures this body fully funds proactive, large-scale treatments to our national forests that will reduce wildfire risk, ultimately saving the Federal Government from having to use an astronomical amount of money for fire suppression and expensive post- fire rehab. Specifically, my amendment increases the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program by $10 million, fully funding it at the U.S. Forest Service budget request. Authorized in fiscal year 2009, CFLRP was designed to encourage collaborative, science-based, large- scale thinning and ecosystem restoration. The program recognizes that future forest management will be most effective if it is planned and implemented in a collaborative framework through private-public partnerships at the landscape level. As an offset, the amendment decreases a related funding account, the Wildland Fire Management-Hazardous Fuel account, by $16.6 million.…”