Steve Daines: “Nationwide, more than 73 million acres of Forest Service lands and hundreds of millions of acres of other Federal lands…”

“Nationwide, more than 73 million acres of Forest Service lands and hundreds of millions of acres of other Federal lands are at risk for catastrophic wildfire. As our timber industry has declined by 90 percent in recent decades, however, our National Forest System has lost much of the labor force to sustain our forested ecosystems and to protect our communities. The Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act addresses both challenges, providing the Forest Service with much-needed latitude to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires while revitalizing our country's dying timber industry. I'm offering an amendment to hold the Forest Service accountable for doing the work required in this legislation. My amendment would simply require the Secretary of Agriculture to submit to Congress an annual report. In fact, the amendment specifies this annual report is one page in length. Rarely do we see a report here in Washington that is less than about 3 inches thick. This is going to require that it's just a one-page summary, simple, focused on the results for each Forest Service revenue area. On this report, we would report the annual volume requirements in effect for that fiscal year: the volume of board feet actually harvested, the average cost of preparation of timber sales, the revenues generated from such sales, and the amount of receipts distributed to each beneficiary county.…”