Political Quotes

“I come to the floor to talk about H.R. 4851, legislation that just recently passed the Senate in the last hour or so. Hopefully it is on its way to final reconciliation with the House and hopefully will become law later today. Before I talk about that, I want to take a second to recognize some provisions that are in the omnibus that we also are going to be voting on in the next few hours, two provisions that are very important to the Pacific Northwest--one, finally a fix on fire borrowing, which is so important to the entire Northwest but particularly in the State of Washington, which has seen the great impact of forest fires in the last several years. This will end the fire borrowing that we have seen that has prevented us from doing the kind of fuel reduction that we would like to see to protect our communities, and it will help us better manage with stewardship contracts and release the funds that should be going to recreation management within our forests. This fire funding fix has been long in the making. I thank my colleagues, Senators Wyden, Risch, and Crapo, for their hard work, and I thank Bryan Petit from my office, who has worked tirelessly on this as well. We are starting a new day in how we treat our forests and hopefully one that will reduce the risks to many communities. I thank our colleagues for working so diligently on including a provision on affordable housing. This is the first affordable housing increase in a decade.…”