Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for his support throughout the process in regard to this bill. There is very little that I can add to what the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee has laid out in his opening remarks in regard to the need for the ACRES Act. One of the few things I can add is a picture. The picture to my right here shows the need for this bill. When the amount of acres that are being treated are not counted accurately, we end up with a situation where those acres that should be treated don't get treated. This is the Grizzly Flats fire a couple years ago that wiped out that community. The Forest Service knew that it was time that these treatments needed to be put in place, and they weren't, and a community was destroyed out in the great State of California. This bill will bring transparency to the misleading and inaccurate way hazardous fuels treatments are reported. Decades of mismanagement of our Federal lands have left our forests overstocked and created tinderbox conditions. We have long known the reported pace and scale of forest management has been insufficient to truly address our forest health crisis. There is a better way to manage our public lands, and that starts with holding our Federal land management agencies accountable by requiring accurate reporting on the effectiveness of their work in fuel reduction.…”