Jay Inslee: “Mr. Speaker, I commend all of the people who have worked on this bill. There are a lot of technical and difficult issues…”

“Mr. Speaker, I commend all of the people who have worked on this bill. There are a lot of technical and difficult issues trying to fashion a hazardous fuels reduction program. And I am unable to support this and I hope my colleagues will join me and the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters and other main-line commonsense groups who have committed their lives to protecting our national forests in defeating this bill and moving on to a better one, and I hope that my colleagues will join me. Underlying that position is the basic belief that the medicine that we are providing here is both inadequate and misguided. It is misguided because it is based on a myth; and that myth rising to an urban legend is that these fires have consumed thousands of acres because people have questioned what some government officials have done, and that is an abject falsehood. The GAO report shows that 92 percent of these projects go ahead unimpeded. In California, you know why the California projects did not get done? It was not environmental project appeals. In the last 3 years, there has not been one hazardous fuel reduction program that held up national forests in Southern California the last 3 years. The reason some of this work did not get done is Uncle Sam, us, did not appropriate enough money for California to do the job. The State of California asked for $430 million last April to solve this problem.”