Angie Craig: “We here in the Senate call it Healthy Forests. The President calls it Healthy Forests. The House and Senate have worked…”

“We here in the Senate call it Healthy Forests. The President calls it Healthy Forests. The House and Senate have worked together over the last year to try to resolve an issue that the American public has seen in the form of devastating wildfires across our public land and forests for the last several years. Of course, we watched the tragedy of San Bernadino in southern California and the greater Los Angeles area just in the last month and a half that was truly devastating not only to 3,700 homes and human life but hundreds of thousands of acres of wildlife habitat and watershed. Clearly, as chairman of the Forestry Subcommittee of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Senator Wyden and I have been working for the last several years to resolve this issue. My colleague from Oregon is the ranking member of that Forestry Subcommittee. We have known that the team effort in a bipartisan way to resolve this issue would produce a resolution. The answer is that it has. The Senate and the House just passed a conference report that has our fingerprints all over it. Frankly, we are mighty proud of it.”