Jeff Bingaman: “last Thursday the Senate passed H.R. 1904, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. I voted for the bill because I believe…”

“last Thursday the Senate passed H.R. 1904, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. I voted for the bill because I believe we need to take action to bring our forests back to good health, and there are some good provisions in the Senate-passed version of the bill. For example, the Senate version allows communities to provide recommendations on reducing the threat of unnaturally intense catastrophic wildfire in community wildfire protection plans. In addition, two amendments that I offered were adopted by the Senate. The first amendment requires collaborative monitoring of the social and ecological effects of projects. Without this requirement, we will never be able to rebuild trust between rural communities and the agencies. The second amendment encourages the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to hire local contractors for forest thinning projects in order to create jobs in forest-dependent communities. Even so, I continue to believe there are serious problems with this legislation. Most significantly, the bill fails to tackle the main obstacle constraining the Forest Service from improving forest health which is the agency's harmful policy of borrowing from proactive forest restoration accounts to pay for firefighting.”