Val Hoyle

The Siletz Tribe is deeply grateful to the support from our congressional delegation--particularly Representative Val Hoyle and Senator Jeff Merkley--to right this historic wrong.

H.R. 2839 is about fairness.

This restriction is called a consent decree. It is an unjust and racist policy that I believe needs to be changed immediately.

Siletz Tribal members should be able to hunt, fish, trap, and gather like they have traditionally done for thousands of years.

The Confederated Tribe of Siletz Indians should be able to hunt, fish, and gather on their ancestral lands, just like all the other tribes.

H.R. 2839 would allow the Tribe to renegotiate their subsistence agreements with the state of Oregon to replace the current consent decree.

Thank you very much. I didn't go to Wharton, but I did spend 25 years working in manufacturing distribution in international and domestic trade.

Because of the unique pattern of ownership, the state of Oregon for years has cooperated with the BLM on a unique fire protection agreement called the Western Oregon Operating Plan.

The checkerboard pattern of private, industrial, state, tribal, and Federal forest makes it complicated to manage, and even more complicated to protect, especially in this era of climate-driven megafires that threaten communities, wildlife…

We are nickel and diming and arguing over continuing this contracting with the Oregon Department of Forestry and the BLM because we have a limited amount of money that we put up front for forest fire prevention.

I really want your commitment to make sure that not only that you will work on it, but we will put our money where we need to, funding it upfront.

The next time that we have really bad wildfires, it is not just going to be 4,000 homes. It will be one of our urban areas, and it will make the Paradise California Fire look like a campfire.

The key is the funding, and the fact of the matter is, it is more expensive to fight fires in the O&C lands in the wetter forests.

But once it is a mega fire, we have unlimited money.

Our national forests are faced with an incredible challenge.

It works well, and it keeps 95 percent of all fires from growing over 100 acres.

In 2020, we lost 1.1 million acres and 4,000 homes in Oregon, and we would like to not have that happen again.

The majority of the forest lands in my district are made up of the Oregon and California railroad revested lands, or the O&C lands, and these lands are unique, their history, their location, purpose, are far different than any place else…

I represent Oregon's 4th Congressional District in Southwest Oregon, and the Bureau of Land Management manages over 800,000 acres of timberland in my district.

Thank you for all the workers in the airports on airlines, air traffic controllers that work in really high-stress jobs.

We need to ensure that we have protections for workers, we need to have high environmental standards, right, for anything that we do, but there is a way to do it.

I firmly believe that we need to move to green energy, move away from fossil fuel, and move to green energy resources as quickly as possible.