Norman D. Dicks: “I rise in opposition to the Wu amendment. Mr. Chairman, I think our side has worked with the chairman to try to come up…”

“I rise in opposition to the Wu amendment. Mr. Chairman, I think our side has worked with the chairman to try to come up with a balanced package. I would point out to my colleagues that in the Pacific Northwest we have reduced timber harvests because of endangered species issues by 85 percent, maybe 90 percent. The administration, when it came to office, held a summit in Portland, Oregon, and said we are going to try to get out of court. We appreciated that. We were enjoying no timber harvest at all, zero, under the previous administration. We worked out a plan, the Northwest Forest Plan, to deal with it. Unfortunately, because the Forest Service has not done all of its work on some of the species they were supposed to monitor, instead of getting to the one billion board feet, down from four billion to one billion, we are now down at about 300 million to 400 million board feet a year in harvest. So what this amendment would do would mean that we would not be able to try to build back up to the one billion board feet that was in the President's plan. We are spending money, a substantial amount of money, on ecosystem management, on watershed restoration. I have made sure that the President's program to help the Northwest was funded over the last 7 years, and we are putting a lot of money into wildlife protection, into the Endangered Species Act, et cetera, et cetera.”