[House Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
GAO FIVE-YEAR UPDATE ON WILDLAND FIRE AND FOREST SERVICE/BUREAU OF
LAND MANAGEMENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN IMPLEMENTING THE HEALTHY FORESTS
RESTORATION ACT
=======================================================================
OVERSIGHT HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON FORESTS AND
FOREST HEALTH
of the
COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
Thursday, February 17, 2005
__________
Serial No. 109-3
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Resources
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/
house
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COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
RICHARD W. POMBO, California, Chairman
NICK J. RAHALL II, West Virginia, Ranking Democrat Member
Don Young, Alaska Dale E. Kildee, Michigan
Jim Saxton, New Jersey Eni F.H. Faleomavaega, American
Elton Gallegly, California Samoa
John J. Duncan, Jr., Tennessee Neil Abercrombie, Hawaii
Wayne T. Gilchrest, Maryland Solomon P. Ortiz, Texas
Ken Calvert, California Frank Pallone, Jr., New Jersey
Barbara Cubin, Wyoming Donna M. Christensen, Virgin
Vice Chair Islands
George P. Radanovich, California Ron Kind, Wisconsin
Walter B. Jones, Jr., North Grace F. Napolitano, California
Carolina Tom Udall, New Mexico
Chris Cannon, Utah Raul M. Grijalva, Arizona
John E. Peterson, Pennsylvania Madeleine Z. Bordallo, Guam
Jim Gibbons, Nevada Jim Costa, California
Greg Walden, Oregon Charlie Melancon, Louisiana
Thomas G. Tancredo, Colorado Dan Boren, Oklahoma
J.D. Hayworth, Arizona George Miller, California
Jeff Flake, Arizona Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts
Rick Renzi, Arizona Peter A. DeFazio, Oregon
Stevan Pearce, New Mexico Jay Inslee, Washington
Devin Nunes, California Mark Udall, Colorado
Henry Brown, Jr., South Carolina Dennis Cardoza, California
Thelma Drake, Virginia Stephanie Herseth, South Dakota
Luis G. Fortuno, Puerto Rico
Cathy McMorris, Washington
Bobby Jindal, Louisiana
Louie Gohmert, Texas
Marilyn N. Musgrave, Colorado
Steven J. Ding, Chief of Staff
Lisa Pittman, Chief Counsel
James H. Zoia, Democrat Staff Director
Jeffrey P. Petrich, Democrat Chief Counsel
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SUBCOMMITTEE ON FORESTS AND FOREST HEALTH
GREG WALDEN, Oregon, Chairman
TOM UDALL, New Mexico, Ranking Democrat Member
John J. Duncan, Jr., Tennessee Dale E. Kildee, Michigan
Wayne T. Gilchrest, Maryland Neil Abercrombie, Hawaii
Chris Cannon, Utah Dan Boren, Oklahoma
John E. Peterson, Pennsylvania Peter A. DeFazio, Oregon
Thomas G. Tancredo, Colorado Jay Inslee, Washington
J.D. Hayworth, Arizona Mark Udall, Colorado
Jeff Flake, Arizona Dennis Cardoza, California
Rick Renzi, Arizona Stephanie Herseth, South Dakota
Henry Brown, Jr., South Carolina Nick J. Rahall II, West Virginia,
Cathy McMorris, Washington ex officio
Richard W. Pombo, California, ex
officio
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C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on Thursday, February 17, 2005...................... 1
Statement of Members:
DeFazio, Hon. Peter, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Oregon............................................ 15
McMorris, Hon. Cathy, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Washington........................................ 15
Udall. Hon. Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State
of New Mexico.............................................. 14
Walden, Hon. Greg, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Oregon............................................ 1
Prepared statement of.................................... 13
Statement of Witnesses:
Cummins, James, Executive Director, Mississippi Fish and
Wildlife Foundation........................................ 60
Prepared statement of.................................... 62
Gregory, Lisa Dale, Ph.D., The Wilderness Society, Denver,
Colorado................................................... 73
Prepared statement of.................................... 75
Nazzaro, Robin M., Director, Natural Resources and
Environment, U.S. Government Accountability Office......... 16
Prepared statement of.................................... 20
Rey, Hon. Mark, Under Secretary for Natural Resources and
Environment, U.S. Department of Agriculture................ 39
Prepared statement of.................................... 41
Tucker, Lena, Society of American Foresters, Springfield,
Oregon..................................................... 67
Prepared statement of.................................... 70
Watson, Hon. Rebecca, Assistant Secretary, Land and Minerals
Management, U.S. Department of the Interior................ 34
Prepared statement of.................................... 36
Additional materials supplied:
Napolitano, Hon. Janet, Governor, State of Arizona, and Hon.
Dirk Kempthorne, Governor, State of Idaho, Statement
submitted for the record on behalf of the Western
Governors' Association..................................... 2
OVERSIGHT HEARING ON GAO FIVE-YEAR UPDATE ON WILDLAND FIRE AND FOREST
SERVICE/BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN IMPLEMENTING THE
HEALTHY FORESTS RESTORATION ACT
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Thursday, February 17, 2005
U.S. House of Representatives
Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health
Committee on Resources
Washington, D.C.
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The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 11:03 a.m., in
Room 1324, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Greg Walden
[Chairman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Walden, Peterson, Tancredo,
Hayworth, McMorris, Tom Udall, DeFazio, Inslee, and Mark Udall.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE GREG WALDEN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OREGON
Mr. Walden. The Subcommittee on Forest Health will come to
order. The Subcommittee is meeting today to hear testimony on
the Government Accountability Office Five-Year Update on
Wildland Fire, and on the Forest Service and Bureau of Land
Management Accomplishments in Implementing the Healthy Forest
Restoration Act.
Under Committee Rule 4(g), the Chairman and the Ranking
Minority Member may make opening statements, and if any other
members have statements, they can be included in the hearing
record under unanimous consent.
It is fitting that this Subcommittee's first full hearing
in the 109th Congress focuses on the issue of hazardous fuels
and its relationship to wildland fire. While this Subcommittee
will take up many other important topics in the next two years,
when it comes to the ecological integrity of our Federal
forests, all other issues take a back seat. The enormity and
severity of the problem and our ability to affect it will have
more impact on wildlife habitat, water quality, air quality and
community protection than frankly any other forest issue.
To explain the explosive nature of the problem, let me give
you some forest growth statistics on our national forests.
Total net growth is currently about 20 billion board feet per
year, while total mortality is approximately 10 billion board
feet per year, and the annual harvest is less than 2 billion
board feet per year. In other words, we are removing less than
one-fifth of what is dying on our forests and less than one-
tenth of what is growing. This is the 800-pound gorilla that is
wreaking havoc on our national forests and why today we have
approximately 190 million acres of Federal land at high risk of
catastrophic fire. While some of you may have grown tired of
our call to thin and treat our forests, let me tell you this:
you haven't heard anything yet.
In 1999, at the request of the Subcommittee, the Government
Accountability Office produced an analysis of catastrophic
wildfire that stated, and I quote: ``The most extensive and
serious problem related to the health of national forests in
the interior West is the overaccumulation of vegetation, and
catastrophically destructive wildfires.'' This is the GAO
making these comments, not us. The GAO's report in no small way
helped to set the stage for many of the positive changes that
have occurred in the five years following the release of that
report, from the creation of the National Fire Plan in 2000 to
the development of the 10-Year Comprehensive Wildfire Strategy
guided by the Western Governors' Association, to the Bush
Administration's Healthy Forest Initiative, to the 108th
Congress's passage of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, and
to the quadrupling of funds spent by the agencies on hazardous
fuels reduction and the resulting quadrupling of acreage
treated--much has been done to address the problem.
This week, again at the request of this Subcommittee, the
Government Accountability Office produced a five-year follow-up
report, which recognized that much progress has been made in
wildfire management, from prevention to suppression. The report
confirms what we had hoped to hear and what many of us worked
so hard to achieve as we developed and moved the Healthy Forest
Restoration Act through the Congress two years ago.
But the GAO also confirms what many of us have seen and
experienced recently as we visited Federal forests, that we
have a lot more to do and a long way to go. So I have traveled
around our national forests since passage of HFRA. I have found
that while some forest units are aggressively implementing the
law, others have hardly begun. The GAO's report corroborates
those shortcomings, stating that a number of the agency's local
fire management plans do not meet agency requirements.
Particularly the GAO reported that an overarching cohesive
strategy that identifies long-term options and needed funding
requirements is still not in place. The Western Governors'
Association, in its own November 2004 report and in written
testimony submitted for this hearing, makes similar
recommendations.
[The documents submitted for the record by the Western
Governors' Association follows:]
Statement submitted for the record by The Honorable Janet Napolitano,
Governor, State of Arizona, (WGA Vice-Chair and Forest Health Co-Lead),
and The Honorable Dirk Kempthorne, Governor, State of Idaho, (Forest
Health Co-Lead), on behalf of the Western Governors' Association
Thank you Chairman Walden, Congressman Inslee and other
distinguished members of this Subcommittee for the opportunity to
submit written testimony for today's hearing on wildfire and forest
health. This statement is submitted on behalf of the Western Governors'
Association by Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Vice-Chairman and
co-lead Governor for forest health; and Governor Dirk Kempthorne of
Idaho, co-lead Governor for forest health. WGA is an independent, non-
partisan organization of Governors from 18 western states and three
U.S.-Flag Islands in the Pacific. We appreciate this opportunity to
present the collective views of the Western Governors.
With the 2005 wildfire season approaching, it is timely to review
progress made during past five years on wildfire and forest health
issues. As we look back, beginning in 2000 with the National Fire Plan
under the Clinton Administration, proceeding to the Congressionally
requested 10-Year Comprehensive Wildfire Strategy and its
Implementation Plan (10-Year Strategy) guided by the WGA, and now to
the Bush Administration's emphasis on the Healthy Forests Initiative
and the bi-partisan passage of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, it
is clear that progress on wildfire and forest health issues rests on a
strong foundation of bi-partisan cooperation.
As a result of this cooperation, significant progress has been made
implementing the 10-Year Strategy: Hazardous fuel reduction acreages
have increased, federal-level cooperation and coordination has been
enhanced through the formation of the Wildland Fire Leadership Council,
and the fire preparedness of many western communities is increasing
through the development of Community Wildfire Protection Plans.
Yet, despite this important progress, after five years of concerted
effort there are still hurdles facing our pursuit of the 10-Year
Strategy goals. Additional commitment is needed. Federal agencies
report that some 80-90 million federal acres alone remain at-risk of
catastrophic wildfire. Wildland fire suppression costs have exceeded
the $1 billion mark in three of the last five years. Significant gaps
remain in implementing the collaborative framework the 10-Year
Strategy. Communities continue to struggle to build local capacity to
develop and implement wildfire mitigation programs. And there is a need
for a clarified vision of restoring fire-adapted ecosystems, including
landscape contexts that emphasize the use of fire as a management tool.
Addressing these important hurdles will require additional commitment
of time, energy and funding.
Clearly there is still much work ahead of us. The three core
principles of the 10-Year Strategy--collaboration at the local,
regional and national levels; prioritization emphasizing the protection
of communities and key watersheds; and creation of uniform and cost-
effective measures of accountability--remain as important today as they
were in August, 2001, when the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture,
Governors, and a diversity of stakeholders first agreed to the 10-Year
Strategy in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Our nation's wildfire challenges will
only be met with continued adherence to the 10-Year Strategy and
integration of its principles into all our efforts to meet those
challenges.
With this in mind, the WGA continues to pursue improvement of our
wildfire and forest health response. In June of 2003, the WGA hosted a
Forest Health Summit to spotlight forest health and wildfire issues. At
the Summit, Governors heard from diverse interests who offered
recommendations to the Governors on how to improve forest health. One
of many items that resonated with Summit participants and the Governors
was a call to review the 10-Year Strategy. WGA established a Forest
Health Advisory Committee (FHAC) to pursue this call and other
recommendations, as WGA continues working with all its partners on
forest health issues.
Governors nominated forest health and wildfire stakeholders from
across the spectrum of interested stakeholders for the FHAC to keep the
Governors on the cutting edge of issues. The FHAC is comprised of more
than fifty individuals from federal and state agencies, county elected
officials, tribes, fire departments, conservation groups, industry,
local communities and academia.
The FHAC is founded upon the principle of collaboration. It is
certainly not always easy, but the results showcase the good things
that come when people work on commonalities. The FHAC is an example of
the Enlibra principles created by WGA. The FHAC lends itself well to
the complex, cross-boundary nature of wildfire and forest health
issues.
In November of 2004, the FHAC finalized its review entitled,
``Report to the Western Governors on the Implementation of the 10-Year
Comprehensive Strategy.'' The following month, the FHAC report was
reviewed by WGA Governors at their December 2004 meeting. The FHAC
report details significant progress over the past five years, thanks in
large part to federal leadership and the professional staffs of the
USDA Forest Service and the Department of the Interior fire bureaus.
It is clear that communities and the environment are safer as a
result of these 10-Year Strategy efforts. Nonetheless, the report also
lays out a comprehensive approach for continued improvement of our
wildfire and forest health efforts. Some of these items will need
Congressional attention. To give you a better idea of the report's
content, a number of items worth highlighting are detailed below. The
entire FHAC report on the 10-Year Strategy is attached to this
testimony.
10-Year Strategy Needs
A number of themes arose throughout the FHAC evaluation of the 10-
Year Strategy. In particular, as we move forward in updating and
improving our work under the 10-Year Strategy, there is a need for:
Improved information sharing and monitoring of
accomplishments and forest conditions to improve transparency. The
better job we do at relaying results of our wildfire mitigation
efforts, the more buy-in and understanding there will be from the
public. To this end, continued emphasis on open, transparent and clear
reporting and monitoring processes is essential.
Committed long-term funding of the 10-Year Strategy.
Drought and climate predictions do not portend favorably for avoiding
catastrophic wildfire and the necessity of threat reductions over the
next few decades. Committed long-term funding from all levels of
government will be necessary to keep the hazardous conditions from
endangering the public and unnecessarily risking our natural resources.
The WGA forwarded 10-year federal funding projections developed by the
National Association of State Foresters in a 2002 letter to Congress
(http://www.westgov.org/wga/testim/wildfire--approps--6--20--02.pdf).
These figures provide some broad guidance on the resources necessary to
meet all of our stated goals.
Landscape-level vision for restoration of forests. When
working to restore forest health as a whole, the broadest possible
vision is needed to address the interconnected nature of wildfire
threats. Community, watershed and habitat protection are best achieved
through landscape-level efforts.
Promoting fire as a management tool. The scale and
magnitude of the catastrophic wildfire threat is beyond the collective
capabilities and budgets of all governments involved in this fight.
Therefore it is important to use all the tools before us, including
prescribed fire. We must earnestly pursue both wildland fire use and
mechanical treatments as management tools for hazardous fuel reduction.
Improved collaboration at all levels of government and in
all 10-Year Strategy activities. As mentioned previously, the current
wildland fire threat is larger than the current ability of government
and their budgets. A recent Colorado State University study put direct
and indirect loses to people and environment from the 2003 Hayman Fire
at $230 million, or alternatively nearly $1,700/acre. In contrast, fuel
reduction costs range from $200-1500/acre, depending on proximity to
homes and the wildland-urban interface. Facing costs such as this, if
we are to see continued progress, it is paramount that we collaborate
on suppression, fuel reduction, restoration and community assistance
issues to maximize results.
The 10-Year Strategy can be broken down into five functional
components; collaboration, wildfire suppression and preparedness,
hazardous fuel reduction, ecosystem restoration, and community
assistance. Below are notable details from the FHAC report, separated
by topic.
Collaboration
Collaboration is seen by the WGA as the linchpin to our overall
success. If federal, state, and local authorities and stakeholders do
not approach wildland fire mitigation activities in a collaborative
fashion, many efforts will struggle, and many more will end up at cross
purposes and weakened results. Here are some actions to improve our
collaborative efforts:
We must do a better job of monitoring for collaboration.
Currently there is limited monitoring of collaborative forest health
and wildfire activities. The Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC)
recognized this and set out to develop a monitoring framework for
collaboration. While still in development, WGA has contributed to this
effort and believes adoption of national level collaboration indicators
will help program, project, and land managers make better decisions in
the field.
Collaboration is not an easy concept to apply. Views on
it differ. To build close working relationships, WGA will convene sub-
regional workshops with federal support on forest health collaboration.
The goal is to bring the collaboration concept to the folks on the
ground by highlighting successful models of forest health project
collaboration. The first workshop is scheduled for this Spring in
Casper, Wyoming.
The national level body for collaboration is the WFLC.
Consisting of federal, state, tribal and county representatives, it is
designed to include all governmental interests in decision-making.
However, there is a need to establish a mechanism for more meaningful
non-governmental stakeholder participation.
Along with the theme of information sharing and
monitoring, improved public access to information under the National
Fire Plan Operations and Reporting System is important to improve the
transparency of actions under the Healthy Forests Initiative and
National Fire Plan.
There is increased emphasis on forest health and wildfire
protection planning. The advent of Community Wildfire Protection Plans
demonstrate the need for development of web-based analytical tools that
make GIS data and related mapping and modeling information available to
local communities.
Suppression/Preparedness
As the most immediate of all 10-Year Strategy goals, the pursuit of
improved suppression and preparedness response has been highly
successful and has made the most progress of all the 10-Year Strategy
goals. Nonetheless, additional improvements are noted in the FHAC
report, with one deserving special mention here:
The increasing costs of wildland fire suppression
threatens to topple all the efforts of the National Fire Plan, 10-Year
Strategy, Healthy Forests Initiative and Healthy Forests Restoration
Act. With predicted worsening droughts, over-stocked forests packed
with fuel, and an expanding wildland-urban interface, the societal,
economic and natural impacts and costs of wildfire will continue to
worsen. And as noted earlier, federal suppression expenditures topped
the $1 billion mark three of the last five years. Such suppression
costs may drain funding for other natural resource and land management
programs in the federal budget.
Austere federal budget estimates make it more important than
ever to pursue strategic containment of suppression costs. With
forests, as with people, preventive medicine is the most cost
efficient. Full implementation of the seven recommendations in the WFLC
chartered and WGA chaired report, ``Large Fire Suppression Costs:
Strategies for Cost Management,'' has begun and needs to remain a
priority (www.fireplan.gov/reports/2004/costmanagement.pdf). As per the
report, true suppression expenditure savings will be achieved by
focusing on strategic cost considerations, such as the seven report
recommendations, not on tactical cost considerations, such as the
apportionment of suppression costs between all involved jurisdictions.
Hazardous Fuel Reduction
The Healthy Forests Initiative has placed enormous emphasis on fuel
reduction efforts to mitigate wildfire. With just over 4 million acres
of lands being reported as treated by the federal agencies in 2004, we
have seen results that give hope to reducing catastrophic wildfire
threats. To continue this success, a number of next steps are presented
in the FHAC report, with two being highlighted here:
There has and will continue to be tremendous debate about
where fuel treatments should be located on the landscape. To
constructively aid these efforts, more emphasis should be placed on
developing priorities collaboratively as outlined in the January 2003
Memorandum of Understanding between federal agencies, states and
counties.
Fire as a management tool for fuels reduction was a
common and re-occurring theme of the FHAC report. The scale of the
catastrophic wildfire situation requires efficient fuel treatment
methods, to which more use of fire, to fight fire, should be pursued.
One method to this objective is continued refinement of federal Fire
Management Plans that prescribe suppression response and could be used
to promote more wildland fire use.
Ecosystem Restoration
When the 10-Year Strategy was agreed to in 2001 and 2002, the state
of affairs around ecosystem ``restoration'' was confusing at best. The
terms restoration and rehabilitation have been, and are often used
interchangeably, but do lead to entirely different outcomes on the
ground. Now, with five years of experience, it is time to revisit the
10-Year Strategy and chart a more clear and understandable course for
ecosystem restoration; a course that hopefully is clear on the
differences between pre-fire restoration and post-fire rehabilitation.
The WGA has already agreed to take up this mantle working with the WFLC
to convene federal, state and stakeholder restoration and
rehabilitation experts in a collaborative fashion to develop updated
articulations of the restoration action items in the 10-Year Strategy.
Community Assistance
Whereas community assistance tends to be the most neglected of all
10-Year Strategy goals, it may very well be the most vital in terms of
the long-term success of the National Fire Plan and Healthy Forests
Initiative efforts. This is because it is the communities who must
eventually take up the forest health/wildfire banner to make the needed
on-the-ground changes happen. Without community assistance efforts,
none of the other efforts will have lasting imprints on the ground.
One great example of community assistance, comes from the Healthy
Forests Restoration Act. The HFRA codified the concept of Community
Wildfire Protection Planning, a significant step that empowers local
communities by engaging them on a peer-to-peer level with federal and
state agencies in wildfire mitigation activities.
Yet there are still a number of improvements to be made, especially
in terms of helping communities find the financial resources to engage
in and contribute toward wildfire mitigation. Further attention is also
needed in the realms of building community capacity, applying
stewardship contracting authorities, improving grants and agreements,
expanding small diameter utilization, and encouraging local wildfire
codes. Congressional assistance will be needed to lift these items to
the forefront of wildfire mitigation efforts and could very well define
the success of all our efforts.
Conclusion
As a recap of the past five years, significant progress has been
made that we need to recognize. This however does not mean we can now
sit back and watch. One particularly ugly scenario involves the
expanding wildfire suppression expenditures that could potentially
drive more and more National Fire Plan activities. This becomes most
apparent with the transferring of funds from other program accounts to
cover growing suppression costs. This threatens to overwhelm and limit
the land managers' and communities' ability to address wildfire threats
proactively. Last year, Congress helped with a stop-gap, $500 million
suppression budgeting measure to head off more borrowing from other
agency programs, but continued Congressional attention is needed to
overcome this juggernaut of a problem.
So, significant efforts still lie ahead for Congress, the
Administration, the Governors and the public. The WGA believes the FHAC
report keeps all of us on the cutting edge of forest health and
wildfire policy and we commend it to your attention.
Thank you again for this opportunity to submit written testimony
and please know that the WGA stands ready to pursue the 10-Year
Strategy goals and looks forward to working with Congress on these
issues as debate and oversight continues.
WESTERN GOVERNORS' ASSOCIATION
FOREST HEALTH ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Report to the Western Governors on the Implementation of the 10-Year
Comprehensive Strategy
November 2004
Background
The Western Governors' Association Forest Health Advisory Committee
(FHAC) was established following WGA's Forest Health Summit in
Missoula, Montana in June 2003. In WGA Policy Resolution 03-18, the
Governors agreed with a recommendation generated at the Summit to form
an advisory committee to assist WGA with forest health policy issues.
Each Governor named persons from around the nation to the FHAC. FHAC
members are listed at the end of this report.
The FHAC's first met in March 2004 in Reno, Nevada. The purpose of
the meeting was to prioritize Summit recommendations and focus future
FHAC work. One of the recommendations that came to the forefront was:
Review Progress to Date on Implementation of the 10-Year Comprehensive
Strategy and Develop Recommendations to Governors on New Action Items.
The 10-Year Strategy and its implementation plan (together ``the
10-Year Strategy'') were adopted by WGA, the Secretaries of Agriculture
and the Interior and many others in 2001 and in 2002. The purpose of
the 10-Year Strategy is to reduce the risk of wildland fire to
communities and the environment. Millions of acres of forest and
rangeland ecosystems are in poor ecological health and at an
unacceptable risk of catastrophic wildfire, as well as insect and
disease infestations. Drought conditions that have been impacting much
of the West in recent years add to the threat.
The 10-Year Strategy establishes a collaborative framework for
local, state, tribal and federal governments, along with non-
governmental interests, to accomplish the following goals:
1. Improve Fire Prevention and Suppression;
2. Reduce Hazardous Fuels;
3. Restore Fire-Adapted Ecosystems; and,
4. Promote Community Assistance.
As of 2004, approximately 75 percent of the action items agreed to
in the 10-Year Strategy are reportedly completed or in their final
stages. In addition, significant related wildfire/forest health policy
and legislative initiatives have recently been undertaken. For example,
the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) passed by the Congress in
2003 calls for using the 10-Year Strategy collaborative process to
expedite hazardous fuel treatments on 20 million acres of federal
lands.
In this policy context, the WGA FHAC believes it is timely to
assess the 10-Year Strategy to determine if the work completed to date
is meeting its goals and to consider if additional action items are
needed to further the goals. The FHAC completed a survey on these
points during the summer of 2004. A 14-page summary of the responses
was prepared. The FHAC convened again in Tempe, Arizona in November
2004 to assemble this report, based on the survey results.
Overall Themes:
A number of themes arose throughout this evaluation that should be
heeded as work proceeds on all four goals of the 10-Year Strategy:
a need for information sharing and monitoring of
accomplishments and forest conditions to improve transparency,
a need for committed long-term funding of the 10-Year
Strategy,
the need for a landscape-level vision for restoration of
forests,
the importance of promoting fire as a management tool,
and
a strong call for improved collaboration at all levels of
government and in all 10-Year Strategy activities as appropriate
COLLABORATIVE FRAMEWORK:
Given the importance of the collaborative process in accomplishing
the goals of the 10-Year Strategy, the FHAC conducted an evaluation of
the collaborative framework called for by the 10-Year Strategy.
Findings are provided below, along with suggested next steps as a
beginning toward furthering needed collaboration.
Summary of FHAC Survey Responses: The collaborative framework is
not being used consistently at the local, state and national level as
called for in the 10-Year Strategy. Most collaboration is occurring
locally when an effective leader(s) emerges from within participating
parties. Success is greatest when locals believe that they have a place
at the table. Collaboration on project prioritization and
implementation at the state / regional level is improving, but seems to
be somewhat exclusive (``by invitation only'') and frequently is not
broadly inclusive as agreed to in the 10-Year Strategy.
The primary mechanism for the national-level collaboration on all
aspects of the 10-Year Strategy is the Wildland Fire Leadership Council
(WFLC). While WFLC functions effectively for coordination among
government entities, it does not provide for meaningful participation
by non-federal stakeholders and tends to pre-determine outcomes prior
to its meetings. The institution of new directives related to the
Healthy Forests Initiative (HFI) and the Healthy Forests Restoration
Act (HFRA) over the past year has made certain collaborative efforts
more complicated. Further, the strong emphasis on fuels (Goal Two)
under HFI/HFRA comes at the expense of other 10-Year Strategy goals,
most notably restoration (Goal Three) and community assistance (Goal
Four).
Priorities to Improve Collaboration:
Highlighting successful collaborative efforts and
establishing measures of success for each level of the 10-Year
Strategy's collaborative framework is an important first step in
improving collaboration. Fuels reduction and forest ecosystem
restoration projects should also report on their efforts in this
regard. Use of the monitoring questions on collaboration provided by
WGA to the WFLC would be a first step for measuring and improving
success.
Support the development and delivery of workshops on how
to successfully and consistently implement the collaborative framework
at local and state/regional levels.
Establish a mechanism for more meaningful non-
governmental stakeholder involvement in the WFLC. Suggestions to
accomplish this include forming a comparable national team that
addresses both governmental and non-governmental interests or by
establishing a formal federal advisory committee.
Seek federal, state, tribal and local resources to
develop Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) and provide for
their implementation.
Facilitate the development of web-based analytical tools
that make GIS data and related mapping and modeling information
available to local communities for wildfire protection planning.
Improve National Fire Plan Operations and Reporting
System (NFPORS) over the next two years. Improvements should:
allow portions of NFPORS to be used by the public and
state/local governments;
capture and store project boundaries, not just project
points;
permit appropriate non-federal entities to annually submit
data for NFPORS; and,
track acres treated under CWPPs and illustrate where non-
federal entities are playing key roles in hazardous fuels reduction
treatments and/or forest ecosystem restoration.
Develop incentives for agencies and landowners to plan
forest health treatments across administrative boundaries and focus on
innovative, landscape approaches.
GOAL ONE: Improve Fire Prevention and Suppression
Summary of FHAC Survey Responses: General agreement that good
progress has been made on Goal One, but continued improvement is
needed. There is an overall sense that suppression is still driving
National Fire Plan activities and that borrowing funds from other
agency accounts to cover growing suppression costs threatens to
overwhelm and limit land manager and community ability to address
wildfire threats proactively. Collaboration is still a challenge, with
many feeling that the cooperative nature of multi-jurisdictional
suppression response is beginning to fray. National level directives
are making local/regional collaboration difficult.
Evaluation of the 10-Year Strategy Goal One Action Items:
(G1A): Fire Preparedness Budgeting--Fire Planning
Analysis (FPA) tool developed, but state and local resources should be
integrated into FPA to capture a valid landscape-level budget picture
of preparedness resources. Future runs of the FPA should strive to
incorporate local resources and stakeholders.
(G1B): Fire Leadership Training--Original intent to train
all levels of decision makers in collaborative decision-making not met.
Progress made, but room for improvement (consider evaluating
collaborative, pre-fire decision-making during post-fire reviews).
(G1C): Rural Fire Report--Report completed
(www.stateforesters.org/pubs/Final Rural Fire Report.pdf),
implementation needs to continue, especially in recognizing equivalent
training and experience as Incident Command System qualified (i.e. red
carded).
(G1D): Minimum Impact Suppression Tactics (MIST)--
Directive issued, (www.wildfirelessons.net/Library/Tools/NWCG--MIST--
Directive--Attachment--1003.doc) concern over consistent implementation
and if best science is available.
(G1E): Fire Prevention Planning / Firewise Communities
USA--Strong support and active encouragement for more promotion.
(G1F): Reporting of Communities Protected--Success
stories appear to be method of dissemination. Stories need to be
ongoing. More consistency in reporting is needed as many efforts go
unreported due to the lack of a formal reporting system.
Next Steps to Improve Fire Prevention and Suppression
A. Cost containment--Wildfire suppression expenditure cost-
containment measures should continue to be vigorously pursued. Full
implementation of the recommendations in the WFLC chartered, ``Large
Fire Suppression Costs: Strategies for Cost Management,'' report should
occur. Wildland fire management budgets are continually driven by
suppression expenditures, thus hindering the ability of policy makers
and land managers to address hazardous fuel, restoration and community
assistance efforts.
B. Prevention Incentives--Continued focus on Firewise Communities
and Community Wildfire Protection Plans needs to be the centerpiece of
local engagement and involvement in wildfire prevention activities.
Instead of rewarding those that have wildfires with additional budget
and personnel, an incentive system should be in place to reward fire
prevention work that results in fewer emergencies that require
expenditures to protect communities from abnormally severe wildfires.
Incentives are also needed to encourage agencies and landowners to
engage with each other, allowing better planning across administrative
boundaries and development of innovative landscape approaches.
C. Improve Local Fire Authority Response--Methods include:
1) Examine the procedures and protocols for the efficient and
expedited use of local resources in suppression activities;
2) Support alternative training methods targeting rural and
volunteer responders as advised under the Rural Fire Report;
and,
3) Develop a system to better engage underutilized suppression
crews for mitigation work between dispatches, especially Native
American crews.
GOAL TWO: Reduce Hazardous Fuels
Summary of FHAC Survey Responses: It was agreed much progress had
been made on the hazardous fuels front. Some regions of the country
expressed the sentiment that the federal government is still driving
the Goal Two processes, with minimal ability of stakeholders to have a
say in decisions and priorities. Clarity on how stakeholders can
effectively participate in the federal planning process, particularly
in incorporating non-federal concerns, is needed. Enhancing the
collaborative selection of fuel treatment projects is also needed to
improve implementation of Goal Two. A lack of understanding of the
collaborative process, consistency in implementation and differing
interpretation of fire regime / condition class (FRCC) were given as
major stumbling blocks. Cumbersome budgeting processes, fuel target
pressures and confusion of definitions impede working across
jurisdictional boundaries. Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs)
with an eye toward landscape, inter-agency, multi-party planning are
seen as a partial solution.
Evaluation of 10-Year Strategy Goal Two Action Items:
(G2-A) Cohesive Strategy ``Cohesive Strategy needs to be
finalized, released and applied.
(G2-B) Fire Management Planning (FMPs)--All agree on the
value of FMPs in order to reintroduce fire as a management tool on a
landscape basis. Questions over national level commitment to their
implementation were raised.
(G2-C) Internet Clearinghouse for Fuels Assistance--Idea
is strongly supported, but only spotty regional/state success to date.
Very important to continue support.
(G2-D) Fire Regime Condition Class--Agreement on need.
The developing system is a good start. It needs to be ongoing and
endeavor to be accessible by as many as practicable, with national
guidance on interpretation and implementation. Needs to recognize/
accept finer scale data where it exists and apply it across all lands.
(G2-E) Fuel Reduction Project Selection Process--This
action is key to the success of the 10-Year Strategy, with many feeling
the collaborative prioritization process is not happening fully. More
collaboration was experienced for projects on non-federal/tribal lands,
than on federal lands. Differing treatment targets / budget cycles
hinder coordination. Process needs alignment with landscape, inter-
agency, multi-party planning and CWPPs project priorities where CWPPs
apply.
(G2-F) Assess policies/processes (HFI) ``Lack of
agreement on whether HFI is helping or hindering the 10-Year Strategy
move forward. Pre-HFI assessments undertaken were not collaborative and
there have been no concerted assessments of state regulations. If
further assessments or changes are pursued, apply the 10-Year Strategy
collaborative framework to evaluate / review processes (NEPA, ESA, HFI,
states, etc.) to date.
Next Steps to Improve Reduction of Hazardous Fuels
A. Fire Management Plans (FMPs)--Pursue policy adjustments that
foster collaboration on FMP development, provide greater recognition of
fire as a management tool, encourage alignment of FMPs with CWPPs and
Land/Resource Management Plans and improve local-level monitoring of
FMPs. Use collaborative framework to construct appropriately scaled
review panels to evaluate FMPs.
B. Greater Transparency--All levels of government should strive
for transparency in fuel project selection by making data such as FRCC
mapping, and out-year planning priorities available to the public in a
timely manner. The Internet and other digital media provide good
mechanisms for evaluating proposed projects for strategic placement.
C. Fuels MOU--Provide guidance to the fuels MOU to help guide
collaborative fuel project selection processes and structures.
D. Project Prioritization--Through a state-level, multi-
jurisdictional, collaborative body, priority should be given to
projects that are an outcome of a CWPP as required by law. Assessment
of risk and landscape management objectives should also be considered
as priority factors in project selection.
E. Pursue Cost Efficiencies--Pursue policies and actions that will
support a utilization infrastructure in order to reduce treatment costs
(e.g., large-scale stewardship contracting) and optimize benefits to
communities. Consider a cost-efficiency criterion in fuel project
selection processes.
GOAL THREE: Restore Fire-Adapted Ecosystems
Summary of FHAC Survey Responses: There is overall agreement that
implementation of Goal Three has been poor. In part, the reasons for
this include: a) the compelling need for agencies and stakeholders to
focus their full attention on Goals One and Two; and, b) confusion over
the intent of Goal Three and of the terminology used therein. Goal
Three was included in the 10-Year Strategy to represent the consensus
among the parties that restoration is vital to improving forest health.
However, the unclear intent and language in Goal Three of the 10-Year
Strategy reflects the fact that in 2001-2002, there was not consensus
about how to proceed with forest ecosystem restoration. The policy
context in 2004, as the FHAC reviews the accomplishments to date, is
considerably changed. Additional detail is needed now to create new and
clearly defined action items for Goal Three. The FHAC looks to Western
Governors for leadership to develop a restoration strategy that builds
on the progress already achieved on Goals One and Two.
Evaluation of the 10-Year Strategy Goal Three Action Items
(G3-A) Post-fire Rehabilitation Training--Training has
been completed for federal land managers, but needs to be extended to
state, private and other forest landowners/managers.
(G3-B) Post-fire Rehab and Restoration Research--The
action item did not differentiate between rehabilitation of burned
areas and the restoration of forest ecosystems in both burned and
unburned areas. There has been more progress on burned area
rehabilitation than forest ecosystem restoration.
(G3-C) Restoration Project Selection Process--Pivotal
item for successful restoration efforts, but current efforts not
meeting mandate. Progress would be positively influenced by the
development of a clear implementation strategy as outlined below.
Next Steps to Improve Restoration of Fire-Adapted Ecosystems
WGA should convene a national working group of state and federal
agency experts, as well as other partners, to develop and complete a
new set of action items for Goal Three by Fall 2005. This effort should
provide a conceptual framework for restoration and address planning,
technical assistance, tools, and priority setting. Specific objectives
for the Restoration Working Group could include the following:
A) Define what is meant by ``Restore Fire Adapted Ecosystems.''
Using the goal statements and actions in both the 10-Year Strategy and
Implementation Plan, define what is intended by ``pre-fire restoration
of fire-adapted ecosystems'' and ``post-fire rehabilitation and
recovery of fire-adapted ecosystems.'' Useful definitions and concepts
can be found in reports such as ``Guiding Principles for Forest
Ecosystem Restoration and Community Protection'' (Arizona Forest Health
Advisory Council, Campbell et al.).
B) Develop a new articulation of G3-B to clearly differentiate
between forest ecosystem restoration and post-fire rehabilitation so
that progress can be tracked for each item.
C) Develop a new articulation for G3-C so that progress is made in
developing a conceptual framework for forest ecosystem restoration,
from which an implementation strategy for site-specific implementation
can be derived and maintained. Both project and landscape scales have
to be considered and local agreement on desired future conditions at
the project level is an essential policy item. Beyond small-scale
prescribed fire applications, this strategy needs to explore the
reintroduction of ecosystem-scale fire into fire-dependent ecosystems.
D) Consider how to promote reintroduction of natural fire regimes
over the majority of forested areas as a strategy for improving forest
health and reducing fire hazard and suppression costs. Investigate the
removal and utilization of stems and biomass necessary to promote
suitable desired future forest conditions and promote opportunities for
local communities to benefit from restoration work, manufacturing and
power generation.
E) Consider how to encourage agency work on Land/Resource
Management Plans and their associated Fire Management Plans that
explore and promote wildland fire use. This should include
consideration of adjacent communities, airsheds, EPA non-attainment
areas, regional haze parameters and other recreational/quality of life
issues.
F) Consider how to evaluate all proposed land management actions
with respect to whether they advance the goal of restoring fire-adapted
ecosystems. Not all actions will, or should be targeted toward
restoration, but actions that move away from restoration should only be
carried out where there is a compelling need (e.g., thinning near
wildland-urban interface in an area that would naturally be susceptible
to stand-replacing fire) or legally binding objectives (e.g.,
protection of culturally-significant sites or habitat for endangered
species).
GOAL FOUR: Promote Community Assistance
Summary of FHAC Survey Responses: Goal Four must be given the same
emphasis Goals One and Two have received in order for its action
items--and the 10-Year Strategy as a whole--to be accomplished.
Significant advances have been made in sharing information on new
technologies for small-diameter utilization (SDU), but communities
often lack the capacity and infrastructure needed to successfully
utilize them. Inadequate investment in related training and technical
assistance, and a lack of financial incentives and funding for programs
to enable SDU implementation have stalled progress.
Evaluation of 10-Year Strategy Goal Four Action Items
(G4-A) Internet Clearinghouse for SDU Assistance--Site
has good information on SDU options and available technical help. Lack
of financing for SDU has stalled progress.
(G4-B) Improve Procurement, Contracting, Grants and
Agreements--Community/contractor capacity, local benefits, cost
factors, merchantability standards, and use of grants and agreements
all need more attention. There is an over-reliance on stewardship
contracting as an implementation tool, given that there is not
consistent contractor / agency ability and willingness to use this
tool.
(G4-C) Sustainable Livestock Practices & Wildfire--No
progress apparent at this time. Because grazing effects are very site-
specific, difficulties arise in determining when/where/how grazing
practices increase or diminish wildfire risk.
(G4-D) Local Fire Ordinances & Planning--Unclear on level
of progress on this urgent issue. Action must occur primarily at the
local level.
(G4-E) Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Definition and
Prioritization--Provisions in the Healthy Forests Restoration Act
provide one approach to accomplish this goal through Community Wildfire
Protection Plans (CWPPs). Maintaining local flexibility is critical.
(G4-F) WUI Community List--Lists should be maintained, as
needed, at the state level.
(G4-G) Improve SDU Material Technical Assistance--
Successful models exist, but assistance services are not widely
available. Elimination of the Forest Service's Economic Action Program
(EAP) worsens the situation.
(G4-H) Firewise Promotion--The program is popular and
successful. Firewise programs should be incorporated into CWPPs.
Next Steps to Improve Promotion of Community Assistance
A. Building Local Implementation Capacity--Western governors
should work to engage/convene a national process that includes federal
agencies, Congressional representatives and stakeholders to secure
support for forest-based economic development and local capacity to
meet the goals of the 10-Year Strategy. Objectives of this effort
should include:
1) Developing an alternative to the EAP and other related
authorities; and,
2) Addressing critical weaknesses in community capacity that
now significantly hamper accomplishment of Goals One, Two and
Three.
B. Stewardship Contracting Collaboration--To improve the
effectiveness of stewardship contracting, the input of agency field and
contracting personnel, communities, contractors, and others should be
sought by the agencies to ensure training and technical assistance meet
existing needs. Training should emphasize the use of the full range of
stewardship authorities to carry out comprehensive forest ecosystem
restoration projects, not just hazardous fuels reduction.
C. Increased Use of Grants / Agreements--The Forest Service and
BLM should make more use of grants and agreements to accomplish land
management goals while simultaneously delivering community assistance.
D. Small Diameter Material Utilization--Continued pursuit of
consistent supply is needed to attract entrepreneurs and develop
markets. Federal agencies need to improve their capacity to inventory
and analyze (species, size, trees/acre, accessibility, etc.) small
diameter material, establish realistic costs for its removal, and
revise merchantability guidelines as necessary to encourage SDU. Local
capacity and potential community benefits should be fully considered
when designing fuels reduction and restoration projects.
E. Promote Local Wildfire Codes--The National Association of
Counties, the National League of Cities and the WGA should work to make
model fire plans and ordinances widely available as well as encourage
states, counties and municipalities to adopt wildfire codes. These
tools should be considered for integration with CWPPs.
F. Engage Insurance Companies--The Wildland Fire Leadership
Council should work actively with the insurance industry to encourage
their greater involvement in implementation of the 10-Year Strategy,
particularly in the context of local fuel management standards, general
Firewise treatments and CWPP requirements relative to reducing
structural ignitability.
WGA Forest Health Advisory Committee Members
Lori Faeth (Lead Governor Representative), State of Arizona, Office of
the Governor
Jim Caswell (Lead Governor Representative), State of Idaho, Office of
the Governor
ALASKA Jeff Jahnke, State Forester
ARIZONA Steve Campbell, University of Arizona
Taylor McKinnon, Grand Canyon Trust
Kirk Rowdabaugh, State Forester
Thomas Sisk, Northern Arizona University
CALIFORNIA Dale Geldert, State Forester
Ly nn Jungwirth, Watershed Research and Training
Center
Tad Mason, TSS Consultants
Tom Neslon, Sierra Pacific Industries
Dan Skopec, Office of the Governor
Bruce Turbeville, California Fire Safe Council
COLORADO Ron Wenker, Bureau of Land Management
Greg Aplet, The Wilderness Society
Joe Duda, Colorado State Forest Service
Gayle Gordon, Bureau of Land Management
Jay Jensen, Western Governors' Association
Paige Lewis, Colorado State Forest Service
Paul Orbuch, Western Governors' Association
Jo hn Steffenson, Environmental Systems Research
Institute, Inc.
IDAHO Todd Brinkmeyer, Plummer Forest Products
Jay O'Laughlin, University of Idaho
Jonathan Oppenheimer, Idaho Conservation League
Pe ggy Polichio, U.S. Forest Service/Idaho Department
of Lands
Sarah Robertson, U.S. Forest Service
MONTANA Julia Altemus, Montana Logging Association
Perry Brown, The University of Montana
Carol Daly, Flathead Economic Policy Center
Patrick Heffernan, PAFTI, Inc.
Craig Kenworthy, Greater Yellowstone Coalition
To m Kuntz, International Association of Fire Chiefs
Todd O'Hair, Office of the Governor
Gordon Sanders, Pyramid Mountain Lumber
NEVADA Steve Robinson, Office of the Governor
NEW MEXICO Arthur Blazer, State Forester
Ri ck DeIaco, Director of Forestry, Village of
Ruidoso
Walter Dunn, U.S. Forest Service
Todd Schulke, Center for Biological Diversity
OREGON Bob Alverts, USGS-BRD Western Regional Office
Charles Burley, American Forest Resource Council
Lance Clark, Office of the Governor
Maia Enzer, Sustainable Northwest
Sandy Shaffer, Applegate Partnership
SOUTH DAKOTA Paul Riley, Office of the Governor
Ray Sowers, State Forester
UTAH John Harja, Office of the Governor
WASHINGTON Kay Gabriel, Weyerhaeuser Company
Don Hunger, Student Conservation Association
Niel Lawrence, Natural Resources Defense Council
Pat McElroy, State Forester
WYOMING Bill Crapser, State Forester
OTHER Dw ight Atkinson, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Paul V. Beddoe, National Association of Counties
Th omas Brendler, National Network of Forest
Practitioners
Stan Coloff, U.S. Geological Survey
Mike Long, Florida State Forester
Jim Mosher, North American Grouse Partnership
Jeff Hardesty, The Nature Conservancy
______
Mr. Walden. So the purpose of this hearing is to evaluate
the GAO's recommendations in depth and to discuss next steps
with the Department of Agriculture and the Department of
Interior, while reviewing the important accomplishments that
have been made thus far.
We will also hear from others on different aspects of the
Healthy Forest Restoration Act implementation, from the needed
implementation of the all the titles of this law to the role
and value of community wildfire protection plans.
It is my hope that when the GAO testifies again to this
Subcommittee five years from now their report will say that our
efforts in this Congress, with this Administration, in
cooperation with states and other allies, have made the crucial
difference between creating a healthy dynamic forest landscape
to one that continues to be choked with too much growth, too
much mortality and too many catastrophic wildfires.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Walden follows:]
Statement of The Honorable Greg Walden, Chairman,
Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health
It is fitting that this Subcommittee's first full hearing in the
109th Congress focus on the issue of hazardous fuels and its
relationship to wildland fire. While this Subcommittee will take up
many other important topics in the next two years, when it comes to the
ecological integrity of our federal forests all other issues must take
a back seat. The enormity and severity of the problem, and our ability
to affect it, will have more impact on wildlife habitat, water quality,
air quality, and community protection than any other forest issue.
To explain the explosive nature of the problem let me give you some
forest growth statistics on our national forests. Total net growth is
currently about 20 billion board feet (bbf) per year, while total
mortality is approximately 10 bbf, and the annual harvest is less than
2 bbf. In other words, we are removing less than one-fifth of what is
dying on our forests and less than one-tenth of what is growing. This
is the 800 pound gorilla that is wreaking havoc on our national forests
and why, today, we have approximately 190 million acres of federal land
at high risk of catastrophic fire. While some of you may have grown
tired of our call to thin and treat our forests, let me tell you this:
you ain't heard nothing yet.
In 1999, at the request of this Subcommittee, the Government
Accountability Office produced an analysis of catastrophic wildfire,
that stated: ``the most extensive and serious problem related to the
health of national forests in the interior West is the overaccumulation
of vegetation, which has caused an increasing number of large, intense,
uncontrollable, and catastrophically destructive wildfires.'' The GAO's
report, in no small way, helped to set the stage for many of the
positive changes that have occurred in the five years following the
release of that report---from the creation of the National Fire Plan,
in 2000, to the development of the 10-Year Comprehensive Wildfire
Strategy guided by the Western Governors' Association, to the Bush
Administration's Healthy Forest Initiative, to the 108th Congress's
passage of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, to the quadrupling of
funds spent by the agencies on hazardous fuels reduction and the
resulting quadrupling of acres treated---much has been done to address
the problem.
This week, again at the request of this Subcommittee, the GAO
produced a five-year follow-up report, which recognized that much
progress has been made in wildfire management, from prevention to
suppression. The report confirms what we had hoped to hear and what
many of us worked so hard to achieve as we developed and moved the
Healthy Forests Restoration Act.
But the GAO also confirms what many of us have seen and experienced
recently as we've visited federal forests---that we have a lot more to
do and a long way to go. As I've traveled around our national forests
since passage of HFRA, I've found that while some forest units are
aggressively implementing the law, others have hardly begun. The GAO's
report corroborates these shortcomings, stating that a number of the
agency's local fire management plans do not meet agency requirements.
Particularly, the GAO reported that an overarching cohesive strategy,
that identifies long-term options and needed funding requirements, is
still not in place. The Western Governors' Association in its own
November 2004 report, and in written testimony submitted for this
hearing, makes similar recommendations.
The purpose of this hearing is to evaluate the GAO's
recommendations in depth and to discuss next steps with the Department
of Agriculture and the Department of Interior, while reviewing the
important accomplishments that have been made thus far. We will also
hear from others on different aspects of HFRA implementation, from the
needed implementation of all the titles of this law, to the role and
value of Community Wildfire Protection Plans.
It is my hope that when the GAO testifies again to this
Subcommittee five years from now, their report will say that our
efforts in this Congress, with this Administration, in cooperation with
states and other allies, have made the crucial difference between
creating a healthy, dynamic forest landscape, to one that continues to
be choked with too much growth, too much mortality and too many
catastrophic wildfires.
______
Mr. Walden. I now recognize my friend and colleague, Mr.
Udall, the Ranking Minority Member, for an opening statement.
Good morning and welcome.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. TOM UDALL, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS
FROM THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO
Mr. Tom Udall. Good morning, Chairman Walden, good to be
here with you.
I appreciate this opportunity to hear the findings of the
GAO's Five-Year Update on Wildland Fire, and the look into
issues surrounding the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. While
this GAO report finds that there has been progress in the area
of wildland fire management, the report finds that the Forest
Service and the Department of Interior still lack an overall
cohesive strategy in dealing with wildland fire.
The report recommends that the Secretaries of Agriculture
and Interior provide Congress with a plan outlining the
critical steps and timeframes for completing a cohesive
strategy, as well as identifying the options for funding
wildland fire management.
I look forward to hearing from the agencies about where
they are in the process of developing a cohesive strategy on
wildland fire management.
I also point out that the GAO report states that the same
request for a cohesive strategy was made of the agencies five
years ago. As we look into the implementation of the Healthy
Forest Restoration Act, I look forward to exploring the
concerns raised by the Western Governors Association and others
about a lack of adequate policy guidance in the area of
collaboration.
Furthermore, with an eye to the Forest Service Fiscal Year
2006 budget, I hope to hear from our witnesses about their
views on funding cuts to the State and private forest program
that assists landowners in the estimated 85 percent of lands in
the wildland-urban interface, which are state, tribal or
private lands. I also look forward to hearing from both
agencies on the total number of acres being treated in the
wildland-urban interface and how that will change in the
future.
As we debated the Healthy Forest bill in the House, I stood
with many of my colleagues in arguing that the money should
follow the threat. Given the fiscal environment we face, it is
just common sense to thin where there is the greatest risk of
loss of property and life.
Another area I think we can take a closer look into is the
growing awareness that for many thinning contractors Workers
Compensation insurance premiums account for nearly 50 percent
of their cost to reduce hazardous fuels.
Last, I believe we are being penny wise and pound foolish
by cheating out our budget for forest thinning. Internal agency
studies have indicated that the need for investment in forest
thinning is multiple times more than the funding requested in
the President's budget. We all know that the funding requested
in the President's budget falls far short of the targets set in
the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. My concern is that this
lack of investment in thinning now just leads to higher
suppression costs in the future. Initial runs of computer
models have indicated this, and frankly, I think it is just
common sense.
I think we will always be faced with a debate over whether
trees are best left horizontal or vertical, but as I said
yesterday, I look forward to working with Chairman Walden in a
bipartisan way to find solutions. This GAO report provides some
guidance on areas where we can work together.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and yield back.
Mr. Walden. Thank you, Mr. Udall, and I like your line
about whether trees are horizontal or vertical. What we want is
not black, but green.
I am now delighted to welcome to the Subcommittee, and give
her an opportunity for an opening statement, a neighboring
colleague to the north of Oregon in Washington, Cathy McMorris.
Welcome.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. CATHY McMORRIS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF WASHINGTON
Ms. McMorris. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will simply say I
am pleased to be here. I represent the area of Eastern
Washington, home of the Colville National Forest and the
Wenatchee National Forest, and some other lands that have
certainly been impacted, and I want to make sure that we are
doing everything possible to ensure that the trees stay green.
Mr. Walden. There we go. Thank you.
I now turn to my friend and colleague from Oregon, Mr.
DeFazio, for opening remarks.
STATEMENT OF THE HON. PETER DeFAZIO, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OREGON
Mr. DeFazio. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am looking forward
to the witnesses.
I believe today we will underline the need, the necessity
to turn even more resources toward fuel reduction in the
future, which will both save lives, property, and ultimately,
although there will be some initial costs, save the Federal
Government the phenomenal amount of money that has been spent
in recent years on fighting fires, and the other nice thing
that comes from all of this is jobs, which is really important
in my district and many other rural areas throughout the
western United States that could be impacted. So I am looking
forward to the testimony.
Mr. Walden. Thank you, Mr. DeFazio.
I would just tell the committee as well, as we did last
year, I have sent a letter to the Chairman of the House Budget
Committee dealing with the issue of trying to set aside funds
in advance that could be drawn upon within the budget framework
to fight fire. As you recall, we were successful last budget in
getting $500 million set up in a special account if you will
that can be drawn upon so that they don't have to rob from some
of the hazardous fuels accounts and other accounts if the fire
season gets out of hand.
Fortunately, last year, not coincidental with my
chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health,
we had very few forest fires out in the west.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Walden. I don't know that I had anything to do with
that, but clearly our committee was at its best.
Mr. Tancredo, we are just completing opening statements. Do
you have any comments you would like to share before we go to
the witnesses?
Mr. Tancredo. How are you today?
Mr. Walden. I am excellent.
Mr. Tancredo. No, I do not.
Mr. Walden. Thank you.
At this point I would like to introduce the witness on our
first panel. Today we have Ms. Robin Nazzaro. I hope I
pronounced that correctly. Director, Natural Resources and
Environment for the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
I would like to remind our witness that under the rules you
are asked to limit your oral statement to 10 minutes. You will
have 10, the other witnesses will have 5. But of course your
entire statement will appear in the record, and we certainly
appreciate the work that you and your colleagues have done on
this very informative report, which I have read in great
detail. We welcome you here and thank you for your objective
look at the problems that we face.
I now recognize Ms. Nazzaro for your testimony. And I
understand you are joined by Chester Joy, is that correct?
Ms. Nazzaro. Yes.
Mr. Walden. And anyone else that you may want to identify.
Ms. Nazzaro. And Mr. Bixler will be running my slides for
me.
Mr. Walden. Thank you, Mr. Bixler on slides.
STATEMENT OF ROBIN M. NAZZARO, DIRECTOR, NATURAL RESOURCES AND
ENVIRONMENT, U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE; ACCOMPANIED
BY CHESTER JOY, U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE
Ms. Nazzaro. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the
Subcommittee. I am pleased to be here today to discuss the
status of the Federal Government's efforts to address our
Nation's wildland fire problems.
As you can see from our first chart, the national trend in
recent years of wildland fire threats to communities and
ecosystems has been increasing. The average number of acres
burned by wildland fires annually from 2000 to 2003 was 56
percent greater than the average amount burned annually during
the 1990s. While an increase in wildland fires may often be
necessary to restore ecosystems, some fires can also cause
catastrophic damages to communities and ecosystems.
To illustrate this point, I have a short video with real-
time footage that shows the importance of fuel reduction in
minimizing such catastrophic damage. The first few scenes show
a fire that is staying on the ground because there is
relatively little vegetation to fuel the fire. In contrast, you
will see the last two scenes are set in a forest area with
dense vegetation. You will see how quickly a fire climbs to the
crown, becoming very intense and fast moving.
[Video shown.]
Ms. Nazzaro. Here in the beginning--this was now the dense
fire.
Mr. Walden. Where was this fire? Do you know?
Mr. Joy. This fire is test tracks in arboreal forests in
Canada because they have to move it up there. They can't do
this.
Ms. Nazzaro. Again, that was real time footage of how
quickly it moved.
Our reviews over the last five years identified several
weaknesses in the Federal Government's management response to
wildland fires. Specifically we found that land management
agencies lacked an effective national strategy to respond to
wildland fires. Existing guidance was not specific enough for
prioritizing fuel reduction projects. At the local level there
were shortcomings in addressing wildland fire issues, including
fire management plans, that as you noted did not meet agency
requirements. The agencies lacked basic data on the amount and
location of lands needing fuel reduction, and they lacked
research on the effectiveness of fuel reduction methods.
Further coordination among Federal entities and a collaboration
with non-Federal entities was ineffective, and they had an
ineffective system for accounting for expenditures and
performance.
My testimony today summarizes the findings of our report to
you, which was released Monday, that discuss the progress the
Federal Government has made in addressing these issues and the
key challenges it faces in developing and implementing a long-
term Federal response to wildland fire problems.
In the past five years, the Forest Service and the land
management agencies in the Department of the Interior have made
important progress in each of these areas, and have put into
place the basic components of a framework for managing and
responding to the Nation's wildland fire problems.
Specifically, the Federal Government has been formulating a
comprehensive strategy known as the National Fire Plan, which
is comprised of several strategic documents. These documents
set forth a priority to protect communities near wildlands.
To address this priority the agencies, working with the
States, identified a list of communities nationwide that are
considered most at risk of wildland fire damage. Further, this
priority has been emphasized by the enactment of the Healthy
Forest Restoration Act, which directs that at least 50 percent
of the amount of funds available for fuel reduction on Federal
lands is to be allocated to these urban areas.
Significant improvement in data and research on wildland
fires has also been made. In 2003 Agriculture and Interior
approved funding for development of a geospatial data and
modeling system called LANDFIRE to identify the extent and
location of wildland fire threats and better target fuel
reduction efforts. While LANDFIRE is not scheduled for national
implementation until 2009, initial results have been promising.
Local fire management planning has also been strengthened.
Completion of the agencies local fire management plans has been
on an expedited schedule and are being prepared using an
interagency template to ensure greater consistency in their
content.
Other critical improvements have been made in coordination
among Federal agencies and in collaboration with their non-
Federal partners. In 2001 Agriculture and Interior jointly
adopted a 10-year comprehensive strategy with the Western
Governors Association. An implementation plan which was adopted
in 2002, detailed goals, timelines and responsibilities.
Regarding performance measurement and monitoring, Federal
agencies adopted a measure that will allow them to better
determine the extent to which their fuel reduction efforts are
directed toward the land with the most hazards. The agencies
also made progress in developing a system to monitor their
efforts. This information will help in determining the nature
of the threats and the likely effectiveness of different
actions taken to address threats.
In addition, the Forest Service and Interior appropriations
for fuel reductions, preparedness and suppression have been
increased substantially since 1999. As shown in the this slide,
overall appropriations for both Forest service and Interior
have nearly tripled in the past five years from about $1
billion in 1999 to over $2.7 billion in Fiscal Year 2004. More
specifically, fuel reduction funding has quadrupled.
While the Federal Government has made important progress to
date in developing a sound foundation for addressing the
problem that wildfires are increasingly presenting, the
agencies need to complete and refine a cohesive strategy that
explicitly identifies the long-term options and related funding
needed to reduce fuels on our national forests and rangelands,
and to respond to the Nation's wildland fire threats.
However, to complete and begin implementing such a strategy
the agencies must complete several tasks, each with its own
challenges.
To finalize a cohesive strategy the agencies need to
complete three ongoing initiatives: further development of data
and modeling systems to more precisely identify wildland fire
threats; updates of local fire management plans to include the
latest wildland fire data and research; and assessments of the
cost effectiveness and affordability of fuel reduction options.
I will briefly discuss each action that we see needs to be done
in these areas.
Regarding the data and modeling system, in completing
LANDFIRE the agencies need a consistent approach to assessing
risks of wildland fires to ecosystem resources and an
integrated approach to better manage and use information
systems and data in making their wildland fire decisions.
Moreover, the agencies will have to reexamine the LANDFIRE data
and models before implementing them to assess how climate
shifts may affect wildland fire risks.
Fire management plans will need to be updated with detailed
nationally consistent LANDFIRE data as they become available,
recent agency fire research on optimal location of fuel
reduction treatments in relation to communities and the latest
research findings on optimal design and arrangement of fuel
reduction treatments.
Last, the agencies will need to complete several ongoing
initiatives to assess the cost effectiveness and affordability
of fuel reduction options. These initiatives include and
initial interagency analysis of national fuel reduction options
which need to be applied to a smaller geographic area to get
more accurate estimates of long-term costs. The second
initiative is a new budget allocation system based on cost
effectiveness that is expected to take at least until 2007 to
complete. The third effort is a new strategic wildland fire
analysis effort that is expected to be completed this year.
That also may help in identifying long-term costs and funding
options.
In conclusion, there are a number of options, each
involving different tradeoffs among risks and funding that need
to be identified and better understood. This is the same
message that we provided to you five years ago in calling for a
cohesive strategy that identified the long-term options and
related funding needed to reduce fuels on our national forests
and rangelands, and to respond to the Nation's wildland fire
threats.
The agencies and the Congress need such a strategy to help
make decisions about effective and affordable long-term
approaches for addressing problems that have been decades in
the making and will take decades more to resolve.
We have recommended in our report that the Secretaries of
Agriculture and the Interior provide the Congress, in time for
its consideration of their Fiscal Year 2006 Wildland Fire
Management Budgets, with a joint tactical plan that outlines
the critical steps the agencies will take, together with
related timeframes, to complete their cohesive strategy that
would identify long-term options and funding needs.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my testimony. I will be
pleased to answer any questions that you or members of the
Subcommittee may have at this time.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Nazzaro follows:]
Statement of Robin M. Nazzaro, Director, Natural Resources and
Environment, U.S. Government Accountability Office
WILDLAND FIRE MANAGEMENT
FOREST SERVICE AND INTERIOR NEED TO SPECIFY STEPS AND A SCHEDULE FOR
IDENTIFYING LONG-TERM OPTIONS AND THEIR COSTS
Why GAO Did This Study
Over the past two decades, the number of acres burned by wildland
fires has surged, often threatening human lives, property, and
ecosystems. Past management practices, including a concerted federal
policy in the 20th century of suppressing fires to protect communities
and ecosystem resources, unintentionally resulted in steady
accumulation of dense vegetation that fuels large, intense, wildland
fires. While such fires are normal in some ecosystems, in others they
can cause catastrophic damage to resources as well as to communities
near wildlands known as the wildland-urban interface.
GAO was asked to identify the (1) progress the federal government
has made in responding to wildland fire threats and (2) challenges it
will need to address within the next 5 years. This testimony is based
primarily on GAO's report, Wildland Fire Management: Important Progress
Has Been Made, but Challenges Remain to Completing a Cohesive Strategy
(GAO-05-147), released on February 14, 2005.
What GAO Recommends
In its report and this testimony, GAO recommends that the
Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior provide the Congress with a
plan outlining the critical steps and time frames for completing a
cohesive strategy that identifies the options and funding needed to
address wildland fire problems.
What GAO Found
Over the last 5 years, the Forest Service in the Department of
Agriculture and land management agencies in the Department of the
Interior, working with the Congress, have made important progress in
responding to wildland fires. The agencies have adopted various
national strategy documents addressing the need to reduce wildland fire
risks; established a priority for protecting communities in the
wildland-urban interface; and increased efforts and amounts of funding
committed to addressing wildland fire problems, including preparedness,
suppression, and fuel reduction on federal lands. In addition, the
agencies have begun improving their data and research on wildland fire
problems, made progress in developing long-needed fire management plans
that identify actions for effectively addressing wildland fire threats
at the local level, and improved federal interagency coordination and
collaboration with nonfederal partners. The agencies also have
strengthened overall accountability for their investments in wildland
fire activities by establishing improved performance measures and a
framework for monitoring results.
While the agencies have adopted various strategy documents to
address the nation's wildland fire problems, none of these documents
constitutes a cohesive strategy that explicitly identifies the long-
term options and related funding needed to reduce fuels in national
forests and rangelands and to respond to wildland fire threats. Both
the agencies and the Congress need a comprehensive assessment of the
fuel reduction options and related funding needs to determine the most
effective and affordable long-term approach for addressing wildland
fire problems. Completing a cohesive strategy that identifies long-term
options and needed funding will require finishing several efforts now
under way, each with its own challenges. The agencies will need to
finish planned improvements in a key data and modeling system--
LANDFIRE--to more precisely identify the extent and location of
wildland fire threats and to better target fuel reduction efforts. In
implementing LANDFIRE, the agencies will need more consistent
approaches to assessing wildland fire risks, more integrated
information systems, and better understanding of the role of climate in
wildland fire. In addition, local fire management plans will need to be
updated with data from LANDFIRE and from emerging agency research on
more cost-effective approaches to reducing fuels. Completing a new
system designed to identify the most cost-effective means for
allocating fire management budget resources--Fire Program Analysis--may
help to better identify long-term options and related funding needs.
Without completing these tasks, the agencies will have difficulty
determining the extent and location of wildland fire threats, targeting
and coordinating their efforts and resources, and resolving wildland
fire problems in the most timely and cost-effective manner over the
long term.
A November 2004 report of the Western Governors' Association also
called for completing a cohesive federal strategy to address wildland
fire problems.
______
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:
I am pleased to be here today to discuss the status of the federal
government's efforts to address our nation's wildland fire problems.
The trend of increasing wildland fire threats to communities and
ecosystems that we reported on 5 years ago has been continuing. The
average number of acres burned by wildland fires annually from 2000
through 2003 was 56 percent greater than the average amount burned
annually during the 1990s. Wildland fires are often necessary to
restore ecosystems, but some fires also can cause catastrophic damages
to communities and ecosystems. Experts believe that catastrophic
damages from wildland fires probably will continue to increase until an
adequate long-term federal response, coordinated with others, is
implemented and has had time to take effect.
My testimony today summarizes the findings of our report released
this week that discusses progress the federal government has made over
the last 5 years and key challenges it faces in developing and
implementing a long-term response to wildland fire problems.
1 This report is based primarily on over 25 reviews we
conducted in recent years of federal wildland fire management that
focused largely on the activities of the Forest Service within the
Department of Agriculture and the land management agencies in the
Department of the Interior, which together manage about 95 percent of
all federal lands.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ GAO, Wildland Fire Management: Important Progress Has Been
Made, but Challenges Remain to Completing a Cohesive Strategy, GAO-05-
147 (Washington, D.C.: Jan. 14, 2005).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary
In the past 5 years, the federal government has made important
progress in putting into place the basic components of a framework for
managing and responding to the nation's wildland fire problems,
including
establishing a priority to protect communities near
wildlands--the wildland-urban interface;
increasing the amount of effort and funds available for
addressing fire-related concerns, such as fuel reduction on federal
lands;
improving data and research on wildland fire, local fire
management plans, interagency coordination, and collaboration with
nonfederal partners; and
refining performance measures and results monitoring for
wildland fire management.
While this progress has been important, many challenges remain for
addressing wildland fire problems in a timely and effective manner.
Most notably, the land management agencies need to complete a cohesive
strategy that identifies the long-term options and related funding
needed for reducing fuels and responding to wildland fires when they
occur. A recent Western Governors' Association report also called for
completing such a cohesive federal strategy. The agencies and the
Congress need such a strategy to make decisions about an effective and
affordable long-term approach for addressing problems that have been
decades in the making and will take decades more to resolve. However,
completing and implementing such a strategy will require that the
agencies complete several challenging tasks, including
developing data systems needed to identify the extent,
severity, and location of wildland fire threats to the nation's
communities and ecosystems;
updating local fire management plans to better specify
the actions needed to effectively address these threats; and
assessing the cost-effectiveness and affordability of
options for reducing fuels.
We are recommending that the Secretaries of Agriculture and the
Interior provide the Congress, in time for its consideration of the
agencies' Fiscal Year 2006 wildland fire management budgets, with a
joint tactical plan outlining the critical steps the agencies will
take, together with related time frames, to complete a cohesive
strategy that identifies long-term options and needed funding for
reducing and maintaining fuels at acceptable levels and responding to
the nation's wildland fire problems.
Background
Wildland fire triggered by lightning is a normal, inevitable, and
necessary ecological process that nature uses to periodically remove
excess undergrowth, small trees, and vegetation to renew ecosystem
productivity. However, various human land use and management practices,
including several decades of fire suppression activities, have reduced
the normal frequency of wildland fires in many forest and rangeland
ecosystems and have resulted in abnormally dense and continuous
accumulations of vegetation that can fuel uncharacteristically large
and intense wildland fires. Such large intense fires increasingly
threaten catastrophic ecosystem damage and also increasingly threaten
human lives, health, property, and infrastructure in the wildland-urban
interface. Federal researchers estimate that vegetative conditions that
can fuel such fires exist on approximately 190 million acres--or more
than 40 percent--of federal lands in the contiguous United States but
could vary from 90 million to 200 million acres, and that these
conditions also exist on many nonfederal lands.
Our reviews over the last 5 years identified several weaknesses in
the federal government's management response to wildland fire issues.
These weaknesses included the lack of a national strategy that
addressed the likely high costs of needed fuel reduction efforts and
the need to prioritize these efforts. Our reviews also found
shortcomings in federal implementation at the local level, where over
half of all federal land management units' fire management plans did
not meet agency requirements designed to restore fire's natural role in
ecosystems consistent with human health and safety. These plans are
intended to identify needed local fuel reduction, preparedness,
suppression, and rehabilitation actions. The agencies also lacked basic
data, such as the amount and location of lands needing fuel reduction,
and research on the effectiveness of different fuel reduction methods
on which to base their fire management plans and specific project
decisions. Furthermore, coordination among federal agencies and
collaboration between these agencies and nonfederal entities were
ineffective. This kind of cooperation is needed because wildland fire
is a shared problem that transcends land ownership and administrative
boundaries. Finally, we found that better accountability for federal
expenditures and performance in wildland fire management was needed.
Agencies were unable to assess the extent to which they were reducing
wildland fire risks or to establish meaningful fuel reduction
performance measures, as well as to determine the cost-effectiveness of
these efforts, because they lacked both monitoring data and sufficient
data on the location of lands at high risk of catastrophic fires to
know the effects of their actions. As a result, their performance
measures created incentives to reduce fuels on all acres, as opposed to
focusing on high-risk acres.
Because of these weaknesses, and because experts said that wildland
fire problems could take decades to resolve, we said that a cohesive,
long-term, federal wildland fire management strategy was needed. We
said that this cohesive strategy needed to focus on identifying options
for reducing fuels over the long term in order to decrease future
wildland fire risks and related costs. We also said that the strategy
should identify the costs associated with those different fuel
reduction options over time, so that the Congress could make cost-
effective, strategic funding decisions.
Important Progress Has Been Made in Addressing Federal Wildland Fire
Management Problems over the Last 5 Years
The federal government has made important progress over the last 5
years in improving its management of wildland fire. Nationally it has
established strategic priorities and increased resources for
implementing these priorities. Locally, it has enhanced data and
research, planning, coordination, and collaboration with other parties.
With regard to accountability, it has improved performance measures and
established a monitoring framework.
Progress in National Strategy: Priorities Have Been Clarified and
Funding Has Been Increased for Identified Needs
Over the last 5 years, the federal government has been formulating
a national strategy known as the National Fire Plan, composed of
several strategic documents that set forth a priority to reduce
wildland fire risks to communities. Similarly, the recently enacted
Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 directs that at least 50
percent of funding for fuel reduction projects authorized under the Act
be allocated to wildland-urban interface areas. While we have raised
concerns about the way the agencies have defined these areas and the
specificity of their prioritization guidance, we believe that the act's
clarification of the community protection priority provides a good
starting point for identifying and prioritizing funding needs.
Similarly, in contrast to Fiscal Year 1999, when we reported that the
Forest Service had not requested increased funding to meet the growing
fuel reduction needs it had identified, fuel reduction funding for both
the Forest Service and Interior quadrupled by Fiscal Year 2004. The
Congress, in the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, also authorized $760
million per year to be appropriated for hazardous fuels reduction
activities, including projects for reducing fuels on up to 20 million
acres of land. Moreover, appropriations for both agencies' overall
wildland fire management activities, including preparedness,
suppression and rehabilitation, have nearly tripled, from about $1
billion in Fiscal Year 1999 to over $2.7 billion in Fiscal Year 2004.
Progress in Local Implementation: Data and Research, Fire Management
Planning, and Coordination and Collaboration Have Been
Strengthened
The agencies have strengthened local wildland fire management
implementation by making significant improvements in federal data and
research on wildland fire over the past 5 years, including an initial
mapping of fuel hazards nationwide. Additionally, in 2003, the agencies
approved funding for development of a geospatial data and modeling
system, called LANDFIRE, to map wildland fire hazards with greater
precision and uniformity. LANDFIRE--estimated to cost $40 million and
scheduled for nationwide implementation in 2009--will enable
comparisons of conditions between different field locations nationwide,
thus permitting better identification of the nature and magnitude of
wildland fire risks confronting different community and ecosystem
resources, such as residential and commercial structures, species
habitat, air and water quality, and soils.
The agencies also have improved local fire management planning by
adopting and executing an expedited schedule to complete plans for all
land units that had not been in compliance with agency requirements.
The agencies also adopted a common interagency template for preparing
plans to ensure greater consistency in their contents.
Coordination among federal agencies and their collaboration with
nonfederal partners, critical to effective implementation at the local
level, also has been improved. In 2001, as a result of congressional
direction, the agencies jointly formulated a 10-Year Comprehensive
Strategy with the Western Governors' Association to involve the states
as full partners in their efforts. An implementation plan adopted by
the agencies in 2002 details goals, time lines, and responsibilities of
the different parties for a wide range of activities, including
collaboration at the local level to identify fuel reduction priorities
in different areas. Also in 2002, the agencies established an
interagency body, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, composed of
senior Agriculture and Interior officials and nonfederal
representatives, to improve coordination of their activities with each
other and nonfederal parties.
Progress in Accountability: Better Performance Measures and a Results
Monitoring Framework Have Been Developed
Accountability for the results the federal government achieves from
its investments in wildland fire management activities also has been
strengthened. The agencies have adopted a performance measure that
identifies the amount of acres moved from high-hazard to low-hazard
fuel conditions, replacing a performance measure for fuel reductions
that measured only the total acres of fuel reductions and created an
incentive to treat less costly acres rather than the acres that
presented the greatest hazards. Additionally, in 2004, to have a better
baseline for measuring progress, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council
approved a nationwide framework for monitoring the effects of wildland
fire. While an implementation plan is still needed for this framework,
it nonetheless represents a critical step toward enhancing wildland
fire management accountability.
Agencies Face Several Challenges to Completing a Long-Needed Cohesive
Strategy for Reducing Fuels and Responding to Wildland Fire
Problems
While the federal government has made important progress over the
past 5 years in addressing wildland fire, a number of challenges still
must be met to complete development of a cohesive strategy that
explicitly identifies available long-term options and funding needed to
reduce fuels on the nation's forests and rangelands. Without such a
strategy, the Congress will not have an informed understanding of when,
how, and at what cost wildland fire problems can be brought under
control. None of the strategic documents adopted by the agencies to
date have identified these options and related funding needs, and the
agencies have yet to delineate a plan or schedule for doing so. To
identify these options and funding needs, the agencies will have to
address several challenging tasks related to their data systems, fire
management plans, and assessing the cost-effectiveness and
affordability of different options for reducing fuels.
Completing and Implementing the LANDFIRE System Is Essential to
Identifying and Addressing Wildland Fire Threats
The agencies face several challenges to completing and implementing
LANDFIRE, so that they can more precisely identify the extent and
location of wildland fire threats and better target fuel reduction
efforts. These challenges include using LANDFIRE to better reconcile
the effects of fuel reduction activities with the agencies' other
stewardship responsibilities for protecting ecosystem resources, such
as air, water, soils, and species habitat, which fuel reduction efforts
can adversely affect. The agencies also need LANDFIRE to help them
better measure and assess their performance. For example, the data
produced by LANDFIRE will help them devise a separate performance
measure for maintaining conditions on low-hazard lands to ensure that
their conditions do not deteriorate to more hazardous conditions while
funding is being focused on lands with high-hazard conditions.
In implementing LANDFIRE, however, the agencies will have to
overcome the challenges presented by the current lack of a consistent
approach to assessing the risks of wildland fires to ecosystem
resources as well as the lack of an integrated, strategic, and unified
approach to managing and using information systems and data, including
those such as LANDFIRE, in wildland fire decision making. Currently,
software, data standards, equipment, and training vary among the
agencies and field units in ways that hamper needed sharing and
consistent application of the data. Also, LANDFIRE data and models may
need to be revised to take into account recent research findings that
suggest part of the increase in wildland fire in recent years has been
caused by a shift in climate patterns. This research also suggests that
these new climate patterns may continue for decades, resulting in
further increases in the amount of wildland fire. Thus, the nature,
extent, and geographical distribution of hazards initially identified
in LANDFIRE, as well as the costs for addressing them, may have to be
reassessed.
Fire Management Plans Will Need to Be Updated with Latest Data and
Research on Wildland Fire
The agencies will need to update their local fire management plans
when more detailed, nationally consistent LANDFIRE data become
available. The plans will also have to be updated to incorporate recent
agency fire research on approaches to more effectively address wildland
fire threats. For example, a 2002 interagency analysis found that
protecting wildland-urban interface communities more effectively--as
well as more cost-effectively--might require locating a higher
proportion of fuel reduction projects outside of the wildland-urban
interface than currently envisioned, so that fires originating in the
wildlands do not become too large to suppress by the time they arrive
at the interface. Moreover, other agency research suggests that placing
fuel reduction treatments in specific geometric patterns may, for the
same cost, provide protection for up to three times as many community
and ecosystem resources as do other approaches, such as placing fuel
breaks around communities and ecosystems resources. Timely updating of
fire management plans with the latest research findings on optimal
design and location of treatments also will be critical to the
effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these plans. The Forest Service
indicated that this updating could occur during annual reviews of fire
management plans to determine whether any changes to them may be
needed.
Ongoing Efforts to Assess the Cost-Effectiveness and Affordability of
Fuel Reduction Options Need to Be Completed
Completing the LANDFIRE data and modeling system and updating fire
management plans should enable the agencies to formulate a range of
options for reducing fuels. However, to identify optimal and affordable
choices among these options, the agencies will have to complete certain
cost-effectiveness analysis efforts they currently have under way.
These efforts include an initial 2002 interagency analysis of options
and costs for reducing fuels, congressionally-directed improvements to
their budget allocation systems, and a new strategic analysis framework
that considers affordability.
The Interagency Analysis of Options and Costs: In 2002, a team of
Forest Service and Interior experts produced an estimate of the funds
needed to implement eight different fuel reduction options for
protecting communities and ecosystems across the nation over the next
century. Their analysis also considered the impacts of fuels reduction
activities on future costs for other principal wildland fire management
activities, such as preparedness, suppression, and rehabilitation, if
fuels were not reduced. The team concluded that the option that would
result in reducing the risks to communities and ecosystems across the
nation could require an approximate tripling of current fuel reduction
funding to about $1.4 billion for an initial period of a few years.
These initially higher costs would decline after fuels had been reduced
enough to use less expensive controlled burning methods in many areas
and more fires could be suppressed at lower cost, with total wildland
fire management costs, as well as risks, being reduced after 15 years.
Alternatively, the team said that not making a substantial short-term
investment using a landscape focus could increase both costs and risks
to communities and ecosystems in the long term. More recently, however,
Interior has said that the costs and time required to reverse current
increasing risks may be less when other vegetation management
activities--such as timber harvesting and habitat improvements--are
considered that were not included in the interagency team's original
assessment but also can influence wildland fire.
The cost of the 2002 interagency team's option that reduced risks
to communities and ecosystems over the long term is consistent with a
June 2002 National Association of State Foresters' projection of the
funding needed to implement the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy
developed by the agencies and the Western Governors' Association the
previous year. The state foresters projected a need for steady
increases in fuel reduction funding up to a level of about $1.1 billion
by Fiscal Year 2011. This is somewhat less than that of the interagency
team's estimate, but still about 2-1/2 times current levels.
The state foresters projected a need for fuel reduction funding
increases that was somewhat less than that of the interagency team's
estimate, but still up to about 2-1/2 times current levels, or over
$1.1 billion annually.
The interagency team of experts who prepared the 2002 analysis of
options and associated costs said their estimates of long-term costs
could only be considered an approximation because the data used for
their national-level analysis were not sufficiently detailed. They said
a more accurate estimate of the long-term federal costs and
consequences of different options nationwide would require applying
this national analysis framework in smaller geographic areas using more
detailed data, such as that produced by LANDFIRE, and then aggregating
these smaller-scale results.
The New Budget Allocation System: Agency officials told us that a
tool for applying this interagency analysis at a smaller geographic
scale for aggregation nationally may be another management system under
development--the Fire Program Analysis system. This system, being
developed in response to congressional committee direction to improve
budget allocation tools, is designed to identify the most cost-
effective allocations of annual preparedness funding for implementing
agency field units' local fire management plans. Eventually, the Fire
Program Analysis system, being initially implemented in 2005, will use
LANDFIRE data and provide a smaller geographical scale for analyses of
fuel reduction options and thus, like LANDFIRE, will be critical for
updating fire management plans. Officials said that this preparedness
budget allocation system--when integrated with an additional component
now being considered for allocating annual fuel reduction funding--
could be instrumental in identifying the most cost-effective long-term
levels, mixes, and scheduling of these two wildland fire management
activities. Completely developing the Fire Program Analysis system,
including the fuel reduction funding component, is expected to cost
about $40 million and take until at least 2007 and perhaps until 2009.
The New Strategic Analysis Effort: In May 2004, Agriculture and
Interior began the initial phase of a wildland fire strategic planning
effort that also might contribute to identifying long-term options and
needed funding for reducing fuels and responding to the nation's
wildland fire problems. This effort--the Quadrennial Fire and Fuels
Review--is intended to result in an overall federal interagency
strategic planning document for wildland fire management and risk
reduction and to provide a blueprint for developing affordable and
integrated fire preparedness, fuels reduction, and fire suppression
programs. Because of this effort's consideration of affordability, it
may provide a useful framework for developing a cohesive strategy that
includes identifying long-term options and related funding needs. The
preliminary planning, analysis, and internal review phases of this
effort are currently being completed and an initial report is expected
in March 2005.
The improvements in data, modeling, and fire behavior research that
the agencies have under way, together with the new cost-effectiveness
focus of the Fire Program Analysis system to support local fire
management plans, represent important tools that the agencies can begin
to use now to provide the Congress with initial and successively more
accurate assessments of long-term fuel reduction options and related
funding needs. Moreover, a more transparent process of interagency
analysis in framing these options and their costs will permit better
identification and resolution of differing assumptions, approaches, and
values. This transparency provides the best assurance of accuracy and
consensus among differing estimates, such as those of the interagency
team and the National Association of State Foresters.
A Recent Western Governors' Association Report Is Consistent with GAO's
Findings and Recommendation
In November 2004, the Western Governors' Association issued a
report prepared by its Forest Health Advisory Committee that assessed
implementation of the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy, which the
association had jointly devised with the agencies in 2001. 2
Although the association's report had a different scope than our
review, its findings and recommendations are, nonetheless, generally
consistent with ours about the progress made by the federal government
and the challenges it faces over the next 5 years. In particular, it
recommends, as we do, completion of a long-term federal cohesive
strategy for reducing fuels. It also cites the need for continued
efforts to improve, among other things, data on hazardous fuels, fire
management plans, the Fire Program Analysis system, and cost-
effectiveness in fuel reductions--all challenges we have emphasized
today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Report to the Western Governors on the Implementation of the
10-Year Comprehensive Strategy, Western Governors' Association Forest
Health Advisory Committee (Denver, 2004).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusions
The progress made by the federal government over the last 5 years
has provided a sound foundation for addressing the problems that
wildland fire will increasingly present to communities, ecosystems, and
federal budgetary resources over the next few years and decades. But,
as yet, there is no clear single answer about how best to address these
problems in either the short or long term. Instead, there are different
options, each needing further development to understand the trade-offs
among the risks and funding involved. The Congress needs to understand
these options and tradeoffs in order to make informed policy and
appropriations decisions on this 21st century challenge.
This is the same message we provided to this subcommittee 5 years
ago in calling for a cohesive strategy that identified options and
funding needs. But it still has not been completed. While the agencies
are now in a better position to do so, they must build on the progress
made to date by completing data and modeling efforts underway, updating
their fire management plans with the results of these data efforts and
ongoing research, and following through on recent cost-effectiveness
and affordability initiatives. However, time is running out. Further
delay in completing a strategy that cohesively integrates these
activities to identify options and related funding needs will only
result in increased long-term risks to communities, ecosystems, and
federal budgetary resources.
Recommendation for Executive Action
Because there is an increasingly urgent need for a cohesive federal
strategy that identifies long-term options and related funding needs
for reducing fuels, we have recommended that the Secretaries of
Agriculture and the Interior provide the Congress, in time for its
consideration of the agencies' Fiscal Year 2006 wildland fire
management budgets, with a joint tactical plan outlining the critical
steps the agencies will take, together with related time frames, to
complete such a cohesive strategy.
Mr. Chairman, this concludes my prepared statement. I would be
pleased to answer any questions that you or other Members of the
Subcommittee may have at this time.
GAO Contacts and Staff Acknowledgments
For further information about this testimony, please contact me at
(202) 512-3841 or at [email protected]. Jonathan Altshul, David P.
Bixler, Barry T. Hill, Richard Johnson, and Chester Joy made key
contributions to this statement.
______
Mr. Walden. Ms. Nazzaro, thank you, and I commend you for
coming in 16 seconds early too.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Walden. A very helpful presentation.
I would just point out for our committee members, you each
should have a document that looks similar to this that is a
report of the fuels treatment accomplishments for each State,
in theory the State in which you reside, and so for Fiscal Year
2004. So you will have some good information there broken out
by agency type, whether it is the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Parks Service and U.S.
Forest Service, and the way that the treatments occurred and
whether it was in a wildland-urban interface of not.
Then also we have provided for you a healthy forest report.
This is information from the U.S. Forest Service which we have
requested on a--did you say weekly basis or monthly basis--a
monthly report on the initiatives being taken to make our
forests healthier and our communities more secure.
So I would draw your attention to both of those documents
which you should have before you.
I have a couple of questions I would like to pose to you,
and then we will go for questions from the other committee
members. Ms. Nazzaro, do you know the status of the 2002
Interagency Options Study concerning funding levels?
Ms. Nazzaro. No, we do not.
Mr. Walden. So you don't know whether it has been adopted
or not?
Ms. Nazzaro. No, we do not know that.
Mr. Walden. Can you describe that for me, what you do know
about it, if anything?
Mr. Joy. Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Walden. Is your mike on by the way?
Mr. Joy. I am sorry. Mr. Chairman, the agency study has
been on the websites, et cetera, and it was intended to be an
interagency cohesive strategy document to support that. It has
not yet been released by the agency. And in response to our
report, one of the things they mentioned was there were some
adjustments in the numbers that might have to be taken into
account because of other activities not funded by the fuel
account, but had some effects. But it is by far and away,
obviously, the most comprehensive study that outlines options
and cost.
Mr. Walden. I commend what has happened over the last five
years, a quadrupling of the monies for fuel reduction is
certainly a major step forward. I think all of us who are
involved in this issue, as I think most of us on this
Subcommittee certainly have been over the years, know that with
the streamlined process we anticipate there will be additional
demands for funding to be able to work through more projects
because we should see more projects come on line, so I think we
are all cognizant of the need for more money and also the
budgetary constraints in which we find ourselves. But I concur
with my colleagues that we are best putting our money in an
investment that reduces the threat of fire and increases the
health of our forests than wail until damage is done.
Since your report in 1999 you state that important progress
has been made. Is there any reason for you to believe that in
another five years you won't also find some significant
process, or have you found reluctance among the agencies to
move forward? I understand they have indicated an inability to
comply with what you have recommended with to their '06 budget
and some difficulty there.
Ms. Nazzaro. On that last point there may have been a
misunderstanding though as to were we asking for the cohesive
strategy that we had initially recommended five years, that
that be completed in time for the '06 budget. Rather, what we
are talking about is a tactical plan that would give you, if
you will, the who, what, where, when is this cohesive strategy
actually going to be developed. We have not seen any reluctance
on the agency part, and as we have mentioned, we have seen
significant progress and would expect significant progress to
continue. However, we do see some significant challenges for
them as well, as we pointed out.
Mr. Walden. In your testimony you indicate a need for more
cost effective approaches to reducing fuels, and obviously we
agree with that, being stewards of the taxpayers' purse. I have
heard some complaints that little mechanical thinning is taking
place, which is more expensive, and that prescribed fire is
currently the number one tool for reducing fuel loads. Isn't it
true that some of the highest priority areas though, such as
the wildland-urban interface, are indeed the most expansive to
treat because we need to do it mechanically? How do we deal
with this problem?
Ms. Nazzaro. At this point our recommendation is to set
priorities. If they would develop the various options and then
look at the available funding or funding needs, at least we
would know that we are funding, you know, the optimal areas and
we are appropriately using the funding that is available.
Mr. Joy. Mr. Chairman, I might also add, as we said in
1999, essentially what you said there, some of the highest
priority areas are obviously wildland-urban interface. There
you have to use mechanical. So there is going to be a need to
not always use the cheapest method but it is not very effective
to have a town burn.
But at the same time, one of the things about the numbers
that you need to understand is that for many, many years in the
Southeastern part of the United States, burning, controlled
burning has been used across wide areas and will continue to be
because they can more safely do it than they can in the dry
west. So part of the imbalance in the figures is that
essentially you will see a lot of controlled burning because of
the southeast. But on the other hand, in the interior west,
where you represent, obviously there is going to have to be
mechanical around towns.
Mr. Walden. And I guess that is one of the issues I intend
to continue to pursue because just a raw acreage number may not
speak to the quality of work being done. It may, but where you
can burn, for example, as you have indicated, and accomplish a
lot in some areas of the country, we can burn in the West too,
but it may not be where we most need to do the work. So somehow
we have to make sure this is balance, and clearly we have the
experts to achieve that.
Ms. Nazzaro. And that brings attention to where we were
talking about the appropriate measurement for success as to
what had they accomplished. Just talking about the total number
of acres burned is not adequate. You need to know how many of
the most hazardous acres have been reduced to less hazardous
conditions.
Mr. Walden. And how those were determined.
Mr. Joy. Mr. Chairman, if I might add one more thing about
that because I think it is so on point, what you have raised
about this choice business. Although it is more expensive to
necessarily have to do mechanical around the wildland-urban
interface, the fact of the matter is that the cost of the
firefighting in that area to protect that is going to also be
massively more expensive. So even though it may cost more as
investment to reduce fuels there, you are going to be saving a
very high investment in what we are going to throw out to stop
that there.
Another thing I would add, and that is I think the
distinction by what we meant be a cohesive strategy, is it is
based on cost effectiveness in terms of what it is, the
expenditure you have to make to prevent the other expenditures.
Mr. Walden. Right. That was Mr. DeFazio's point.
Mr. Joy. And over time it is making the investment now so
that you don't have to do it later. It is both time and place,
the cost effectiveness. That is what we mean by cohesive and
how it is different than say the 10-year comprehensive
strategy.
Mr. Walden. I thank you very much.
I now turn to my colleague, Mr. Udall, for questions.
Mr. Tom Udall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Following up on what you just specifically said, how are we
doing when you look at the big numbers? The numbers in your
report are very large in terms of acreage of fuel-treated
areas. Do you have any conclusions in terms of how we are doing
on what you just talked about?
Ms. Nazzaro. In looking at the total number of acres
doesn't present the right picture. The agencies talk about
reducing the number of acres, but what we really would like to
see is a discussion of how many of the higher hazardous acres
have been, if you will, corrected and are now in the less
hazardous range. So at this point we have not verified or
validated any of their numbers. We have not gone out to look at
any of these sites. So I couldn't tell you the accuracy of
their data.
Mr. Tom Udall. Do you think that would be a helpful thing
at this point, or is the most important thing this cohesive
strategy and the tactical plan?
Ms. Nazzaro. That clearly is, long-term, the best approach,
so that you know exactly what we are dealing with, what options
are available to us and what the potential costs could be, and
then if we are limited by funds, that we are applying the funds
appropriately.
Mr. Joy. Mr. Udall, and in fairness also, it should be
noted that the number that you are looking at, say in the
budget that talk about total number of acres?
Mr. Tom Udall. Yes.
Mr. Joy. One of the things we note in the report, the
agencies have adopted a new way of counting that is not
reflected in those yet. The GPRA measures for performance for
fuel reduction are moving, instead of to just gross acreage
numbers, to acres that have been moved from a hazardous
condition to a less hazardous condition, so there may be a
little catch up here in the actual reporting. I would imagine
next year you will be getting the types of numbers that Ms.
Nazzaro was speaking about.
Mr. Tom Udall. On page 10 of your testimony you say that
this is the same message that we provided to this Subcommittee
five years ago in calling for a cohesive strategy that
identified options and funding means, but it is still not being
completed. I understand there is a little bit of disagreement
here on whether you are calling in '06 for the cohesive
strategy to be in place or whether you are calling for a
tactical plan that will put the cohesive strategy in place. I
mean, what kind of timetable do you think we are looking at and
do you recommend in terms of getting the cohesive strategy in
place and operating?
Mr. Joy. Mr. Chairman, if the question is, should it be
five years from now, well, I would suppose everybody would hope
that would be the case, but I guess the point of our
recommendation is not so much that there is a point in time
that we should all wait for. We already have the 2002 analysis
which needs some adjustment. There are a lot of things that can
be done now to begin to frame that picture from the bottom up.
I guess what I am saying is if you take that as a first
approximation, then the question begins, OK, how does it play
out in the local areas, to the fire management plans now? That
should be something that should be updated, but again, as Ms.
Nazzaro said, we are not calling for that to be done by the
2006 budget. We are just saying, tell us the schedule for
developing it, because five years ago we said to do it, and
here we are now. There wasn't sort of a schedule laid out.
Maybe if we had a schedule for doing it, then it will be a more
sort of transparent focus process.
Mr. Tom Udall. Wouldn't a year be a reasonable amount of
time to come up with a strategy?
Mr. Joy. An initial approximation? Well, as I say, they
already have an initial approximation with the 2002 one, but of
course that needs some refinement.
Mr. Tom Udall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Walden. Thank you, Mr. Udall.
Mr. Hayworth?
Mr. Hayworth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Ms. Nazzaro. I apologize, we have concurrent
meetings in Ways and Means today so I am a little late and
could not personally hear your testimony.
As I have reflected on the questioning of my colleagues,
perhaps this isn't so much an interrogative as just a
restatement of some of the challenges we are facing. We are oft
accused of inventing a bureaucratic bogeyman, but one of the
challenges we confront is so often it seems while our forest
burn--and I realize there have been a variety of folks who step
in ostensibly for the right reasons and are able to get
injunctions at the last nanosecond, at the eleventh hour to
prevent thinning projects somehow, the misguided notion that by
not having forest thinning we are actually saving the forest,
and we have seen what has happened with the destruction that
has been wreaked in the State of Arizona and elsewhere in the
West. And of course we moved for it here with the help of the
Administration, and at long last passed a Healthy Forest
Initiative.
I guess the challenge that we need to look at is we are
dealing with accountability. When we become prisoners of a
process and bureaucratic inertia sets in to where in examining
what the process will be, we will have a meeting now to decide
next Thursday when the third meeting will be, and then perhaps
we can come to some sort of decision in terms of the process,
it doesn't do any good for anybody.
I know we are going to have your best efforts, but it would
be my hope because so obviously there needs to a framework of
accountability and a way to see how results are measured, and
as we move forward with this, I would think that--I heard my
colleague from New Mexico talk about a year's time. We have to
get through another fire season. We have real challenges. We
probably needed this stuff a year ago yesterday, even before
passing this. That was then, this is now.
I guess what I am trying to say is can we get this done
stat? Can we move forward much more quickly? Because when we
are dealing with--as we heard in the testimony, when you take a
look at--luckily, Show Low, Arizona was averted in the Rodeo-
Chediski fire, but when you look at what has happened, the
effects of these fires on towns in the west, for all intents
and purposes, they become like a war zone. Is there a sense of
urgency to understand that domestically we are basically
dealing with these forests in the aftermath in a war zone, and
will we see that type of mentality, get it done stat brought to
these projects?
Ms. Nazzaro. I don't want to appear glib in an answer, but
I would suggest you ask the agency those questions as to what
they could realistically do in what kind of a timeframe.
Mr. Hayworth. Well, let me ask then in terms of the
standards, all glibness aside, are you satisfied that best
efforts are being followed, that we are seeing the translation
of what the intent of the Congress was to bureaucratic
regulation? Is it your perception that within the agencies that
things are moving along at an adequate clip?
Ms. Nazzaro. They are making progress toward this cohesive
strategy. We did not look at the process actually to see if
there are problems, that maybe they are doing some things wrong
or some things that are right should be done more. We did not
assess process, so I don't know that I can give a fair answer
to that.
Mr. Hayworth. Thank you for your time.
Mr. Walden. Thank you.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from the Fourth District
of Oregon, Mr. DeFazio.
Mr. DeFazio. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
When I look at your report, page 15, it says, ``The team
concluded reducing the risk to communities and ecosystems
across the Nation could require an approximate tripling of
current fuel reduction funding to about $1.4 billion for an
initial period of a few years.''
As I look at the budget this year, BLM and Forest Service
comes to about $492 million, which is approximately a third of
that. So where are we getting spending at one-third of that
level? Are we keeping up with the increase of fuel loads? Are
we getting ahead of it, or are we falling behind?
Mr. Joy. Congressman DeFazio, I think the study says that
at that level, or at least at the level that was being spent in
2002, we are probably falling behind. But the issue here is--
and that is really why the importance of options--the reason
for that is there is a good chance we will never do everything,
and so it involves making choices. Congressman Hayworth's
point, for instance, about this being a war footing is sort of
like trying to figure out where it is you can make some
progress. You have to make some choices.
We are not in a position to say that the 2002 interagency
analysis is correct because we didn't examine it, and we want
to make very clear we are not saying that any given level is
the right one or wrong one. Clearly, the conclusion of that
report is that more has to be done. But let's suppose that
there is X amount of money. The question is always going to be,
what is the best set of options to spend that money?
Mr. DeFazio. Right.
Mr. Joy. And that is the framework. I wish I could be more
direct in an answer to you, but you understand we are not--
Mr. DeFazio. No, no, I understand.
Mr. Joy. But we have to have a framework.
Mr. DeFazio. So basically with proper planning,
prioritization, targeting, we could for several years spend
productively, cost effectively, about three times what we are
spending?
Mr. Joy. That is that report's initial observation or
initial assessment. We think that is why it is an important one
to serve as the baseline.
Mr. DeFazio. Just focusing on the wildland-urban interface,
you pointed out that it is more expensive to operate there. But
there is one principal reason for that. It is more labor
intensive, obviously, selective removal of understory, removal
of brush, those sorts of things. But if we look at a cost/
benefit ratio in terms of cost avoided, in terms of
firefighting in or near urban areas or even isolated dwellings
that are in the interface that are surrounded by forest, and
also the beneficial effects of employment, has anybody studied
that or quantified that in any way to show what the cost/
benefit ratio is or what the employment impacts are in these
rural areas, many of which are depressed in my State and other
States, by spending money doing the mechanical work in the
urban wildland-urban interface?
Ms. Nazzaro. No. The answer to that is no, but the logic,
the argument you make seems very solid.
Mr. DeFazio. Maybe do you think it would be useful as part
of that targeting process to have those as factors? When the
agencies are looking at how to target, wouldn't it be useful to
use those factors, what the potential avoided cost is in terms
of major fire events proximate to dwellings in those areas?
Ms. Nazzaro. Definitely.
Mr. DeFazio. And also the employment effect?
Mr. Joy. That is what the 2002 analysis did on a national
scale, except it didn't get into quite some of the economic
ones, and their point was that that same analysis to be more
accurate has to be brought down to the more local level where
you can get those kinds of numbers, and then aggregate it up to
get a more accurate. That is essentially the starting point of
that.
Mr. DeFazio. So that is something to ask the agencies
again, are they moving in that direction? Are they doing that
sort of analysis. Because to me--it is hard with these gross
numbers to know, because there are so many varying situations
even within just my State. When I look here, it looks like we
spend--in terms of acreage, we are doing an awful lot of
mechanical in other than wildland-urban interface. But with
these gross numbers I don't know what that means where it is.
But we had a fire in Greg's district along Century Drive
there in Central Oregon where--it is one of the most startling
examples of a lost opportunity because if you drive along, you
can see where you had these big ponderosas were torched because
there were ladder fuels right next to them which were trees
that should have been thinned out that were substantial in
size, 30, 40 feet high, but they allowed crown fire to happen
and killed the larger trees that would have and have
historically survived. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Walden. Thank you, Mr. DeFazio.
Mr. Peterson, do you have any questions for the panel?
Mr. Peterson. No.
Mr. Walden. Mr. Inslee, do you have any questions for the
GAO representatives?
Mr. Inslee. I do. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am sorry I haven't been able to hear your testimony. I
will read it. I just want your comments on the wildland-urban
interface, and I just briefly picked up that it looked like
less than half of the expenditures are in the wildland-urban
interface even within Federal ownership. Is that accurate and
is there any changes coming in that regard, or what could you
tell us about that?
Ms. Nazzaro. These are numbers that the agency reported,
and we did not get behind any of the numbers to determine
accuracy. I mentioned that earlier, that we did not go in and
verify or validate any of the data that they gave us. It may be
more appropriate for you to ask the agency how accurate they
are or what direction they are moving.
Mr. Inslee. Is there anything in your report about sort of
the thinking of the agency in that distribution model? In other
words, they felt statutorily compelled to be at 50/50 or they
were unable to do a different allocation that they wanted to,
any findings in that regard?
Ms. Nazzaro. That isn't something that we pursued with
them, but the overall priority has been determined to be these
communities that are near, that are in the urban interface as
you mention, and that has been set as a priority and certainly
I would expect that they would be increasingly focusing on that
area.
Mr. Inslee. Thank you.
Mr. Walden. Is that it, Mr. Inslee?
Mr. Inslee. Yes, thank you.
Mr. Walden. Staff indicates to me that in Fiscal Year 2004
about 62 percent of the funds were spent in the wildland-urban
interface. We will hear from the agency to further deal with
that. Obviously, they need to follow our statutory guidelines.
We want to thank this panel very much. Thank you and your
colleagues for the work you have done on this report. It is
invaluable information as we pursue this together to make our
forests healthier and safer. Thank you for being with us. By
the way, obviously, the hearing will stay open, the record, for
10 days, so if committee members who are here or not here have
additional questions, they will be able to submit those and get
answers.
Now I would like to introduce our second panel. On Panel II
we have The Honorable Rebecca Watson, Assistant Secretary for
Land and Minerals Management, U.S. Department of the Interior;
and The Honorable Mark Rey, Under Secretary for Natural
Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
Let me remind our witnesses that under our committee rules
you are asked to limit your statements to five minutes, and of
course your entire statement will appear in the record.
I would now like to recognize Ms. Watson if you are ready
for your statement. Thank you for being with us, and thank you
for all the work you do in the agency.
STATEMENT OF REBECCA WATSON, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR LAND AND
MINERALS MANAGEMENT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
Ms. Watson. Thank you. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and
members of the committee.
I am Rebecca Watson, Assistant Secretary for Land and
Minerals Management at the Department of the Interior. I
appreciate having the opportunity to discuss the Bureau of Land
Management's implementation of the Healthy Forest Restoration
Act.
The Department of Interior is working aggressively to use
the tools provided by the President's Healthy Forest Initiative
and the Healthy Forest Restoration Act to reduce hazardous
fuels. The Bureau of Land Management was fortunate to be
provided stewardship contracting authority through the Omnibus
Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2003. The BLM is matching up
the best tools with project needs to get hazardous fuels work
done.
Within months of HFRA's passage the Forest Service and BLM
issued a joint implementation guide for field offices. I
personally led a satellite broadcast mandatory training session
for all BLM field offices on these new authorities. I wanted to
emphasize the importance of these tools, encourage our people
to use these tools so they would use the right tools to get the
work done.
I think one of the most innovative tools Congress has
provided is stewardship contracting. It allows us to enter into
long term goods for service contracts up to 10 years that not
only result in improved land health but also encourages
infrastructure investment. This investment can turn forest
slash into bio-energy. By the end of 2005, only our second year
of implementation, the BLM will have used the stewardship
contracts for more than 90 projects, and produced more than
30,000 tons of biomass energy.
In this first photo, it is Canyon City, Oregon, where BLM
has entered into a stewardship contract at Little Canyon
Mountain. The photo on the left is Canyon City in 1898. The
photo on the right is from 2002. The forest condition in 1898
was primarily open forest on the upper reaches of the mountain.
Today, about 100 years later, the forest is densely colonized
areas that were once open and created the classic wildland-
urban interface. In the middle of the 2002 photo you can see
pine trees with red needles that have been killed by pine bark
beetles.
The second photo shows a closeup of the understory
vegetation, thick Doug fir with few pine trees. The project was
designed to remove the ladder fuels and open up the crowns to
reduce the potential for crown fires. The reduced density will
also improve stand resistance to beetles. The photo on the
right shows the stand after treatment. The project is in its
first year of a 10-year contract that will ultimately treat
1,850 acres and exchange nearly $120,000 worth of saw timber
for the work.
The next photo. The project at Little Canyon Mountain was
developed in a collaborative framework with the BLM. Mr.
Chairman, you might recognize this photo.
Mr. Walden. I was going to commend you on not only your
photography but your choice of locations.
Ms. Watson. Well, you know, we see a handsome guy, we have
to include him there.
The next project is in Medford, Oregon.
Mr. Walden. Another splendid location I might add.
[Laughter.]
Ms. Watson. I know, it is rather shameless. But this one, I
actually just reviewed this week at the Department of Interior
we are reviewing these stewardship contracts at my level in the
first year to make sure they are on target, and this one is one
that really did strike me. These landowners in this area had
looked at their own land, they had done fuels treatment in
their land, but right in the middle was a landlocked parcel of
BLM land and there was no access for BLM in there without
permission of landowners. They came to the BLM and they said,
``We want to treat your land. It is a fire hazard to our
land.'' So they have presented a stewardship contract. They are
going to go in there. It is going to produce some posts and
poles, firewood and some saw logs, and the BLM finds this will
cut the cost of the project in half. So it came right out of
the community for us.
The next photo. This project gets at some of the issues
that were raised earlier, and this is the potential for
commercial biomass. This is a forest project in Alturas,
California. This is management, restoration of sagebrush steppe
getting rid of western juniper.
This is a fire regime condition class 3. It is an area I
visited last year. Again, it is a community focused project in
Susanville, California. They want to clear 400,000 acres of
juniper. They are going to provide 5.2 million tons of biomass
to a nearby biomass power plant. Biomass has a huge potential
to help us take what would otherwise be a cost and turn it into
an economic opportunity for communities in the West.
Another opportunity, again in Oregon, is the Warm Springs
Tribe. We are working with the Confederated tribes of the Warm
Spring in Oregon to develop a plant that will use biomass from
both BLM and Forest Service lands. The Deschutes County
Conservation District is part of this effort. It is going to
create 75 new jobs and preserve 135 jobs at the tribe's
sawmill. I would add that the National Association of
Conservation Districts is a strong partner with Department of
Ag and Department of Interior in providing education on the
potential of biomass. We signed an MOU with them. We have
provided them funding, and they are working with us to educate
folks in this area.
Photo No. 5 is Klamath Falls, showing again how we can
utilize juniper. There is other uses for this material that we
take off the forest. Then I want to skip to the next photo, and
next one.
And this is LANDFIRE we heard discussed earlier in the
testimony. This shows how we can use LANDFIRE. It is a tool not
only to help us target how we spend our money, but it also
helps us fight fires more intelligently. This showed where the
predicted fire was in red, and then the actual fire is in
purple. This was a prototype. It was used in my home State of
Montana to help them fight the Rampage fire. This allowed them
to move their resources over there and fight the fire more
quickly and more efficiently, more cost effectively.
Next slide. This is in a King River study area in Sierra
National Forest in California and it shows a different use for
LANDFIRE, and again it gets to the idea of how can we use our
dollars more effectively? How can we target what acres we want
to treat? And this shows predicted fire behavior. This shows
where fire would move more easily, and that shows in the red.
The thickest lines represent the highest risk for fire
movement. Knowing these potential pathways, land managers could
plan strategic fuels treatment, shown in green, so they could
place those where they could best slow the spread of fires. In
this example these fuel treatments could reduce the burn area
by some 45 percent.
The last photograph. That is a fire whirl. These can
buildup hundreds of feet high and crash down, igniting large
areas. Predictive fuels modeling with fire behavior and weather
modeling can help us understand where conditions can create
this devilish dance. LANDFIRE is a vital tool for identifying
and mitigating risk, identifying community wildfire protection
plans.
I think the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service
have made significant improvements in reducing the risk of
catastrophic wildfire as the GAO recognized in its excellent
report. There is always room for improvement and more work, and
we appreciate the GAO's focus on what we can do to move
forward, and we are eager to do so with your cooperation and
theirs.
With that, I will conclude my remarks.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Watson follows:]
Statement of Rebecca Watson, Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals
Management, U.S. Department of the Interior
Thank you for the opportunity to testify on the U.S. Department of
the Interior's progress toward implementing the Healthy Forests
Restoration Act (HFRA) [P.L.108-148]. I am Rebecca Watson, Assistant
Secretary of the Interior for Land and Minerals Management. The
testimony of my colleague, Mark Rey, Under Secretary for Natural
Resources and Environment at the Agriculture Department, addresses
implementation of HFRA by the U.S.D.A. Forest Service. My statement
will address the implementation of HFRA by the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM).
The authorities of the HFRA build upon, and work in conjunction
with, other programs, including the President's Healthy Forests
Initiative (HFI), the National Fire Plan, and stewardship contracting
under the 2003 Omnibus Appropriations Act, to reduce the threat of
wildland fires and restore the health of our public lands.
Implementation of Healthy Forests Initiative
The HFRA complements administrative reforms developed and
implemented since the President announced the HFI in August 2002. These
administrative reforms facilitate hazardous fuels treatment and
restoration projects on Federal land, including:
Two new categorical exclusions under the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to facilitate implementation of fuels
treatment projects and post-fire rehabilitation activities that do not
have significant environmental effects;
Streamlined consultation procedures for threatened and
endangered species with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National
Marine Fisheries Service for National Fire Plan projects;
Improved direction from the Council on Environmental
Quality (CEQ) on conducting environmental assessments under NEPA;
Improved procedures for administrative appeals of
proposed agency actions; and
Publication of a Federal Register Notice for wood biomass
removal in all service contracts.
Stewardship Contracting
The BLM and the Forest Service were authorized under the FY 2003
Omnibus Appropriations Act (Section 323 of P.L. 108-7) to use
stewardship contracting to reduce hazardous fuels and restore forest
and rangeland health. Stewardship contracts allow private companies,
tribes, non-profit organizations, and others to retain forest and
rangeland products in exchange for performing services to improve
forest and rangeland health. This authority allows Federal land
management agencies to achieve important land health goals. Long-term
contracts (up to 10 years) foster a public/private partnership by
giving those who undertake stewardship contracts the security to invest
in equipment and infrastructure that will enable them to harvest or
productively use the biomass generated from these stewardship services
to make products or to produce biomass energy.
By the end of FY 2005, the BLM will have used stewardship
contracting authority for over 90 projects to restore forest health and
treat fuels on approximately 40,000 acres of public land. For example,
the forested areas near Canyon City, a community of 700 residents in
central Oregon, experienced significant mountain pinebeetle infestation
mortality. In response, in 2004 the BLM issued a 10-year stewardship
contract to reduce fuels, improve forest health, and reduce soil
erosion on nearly 1,850 acres of public land. Under the stewardship
contract, the BLM will exchange approximately $120,000 of small
diameter sawtimber (2.5 million board feet) for fuels reduction
services and other restoration activities.
BLM's Implementation of HFRA
Since HFRA was signed into law in December 2003, the BLM and Forest
Service have developed procedures and guidance for the use of this new
authority on projects to reduce the risk of severe wildland fire and
restore forest and rangeland health, including:
Issuing an interim field guide in February 2004 that was
jointly prepared by the BLM and the Forest Service to assist Federal
land managers in better understanding the requirements for
implementation of the HFRA;
Developing a variety of educational and training tools
for agency employees on HFI and HFRA, stewardship projects, Endangered
Species Act counterpart regulations, and biomass programs;
Applying these new tools (such as categorical exclusions,
HFRA, and CEQ guidelines on environmental assessments) in 2005 in
planning nearly half of all new fuels treatment projects, an increase
of approximately 85 percent over FY 2004;
Certifying 413 BLM staff to use the new counterpart
regulations for consultation on threatened and endangered species; and
Issuing a variety of materials on the HFI and HFRA that
are available to the public on the Internet at the website:
www.healthyforests.gov.
Implementation of Specific Titles of HFRA
Title I--Hazardous Fuels Reduction on Federal Lands
The HFRA provides for the collaborative development and expedited
environmental analysis of authorized projects on public lands managed
by the BLM that are at risk of catastrophic wildland fire. The HFRA
authorizes expedited action on public lands: located in wildland-urban
interface (WUI) areas; identified as condition class 3 (high fire
frequency) where there are at-risk municipal water supplies; where
threatened and endangered species or their habitats are at-risk of
catastrophic fire and fuels treatments can reduce those risks; and
where windthrow, insect infestation, or disease epidemics threaten the
forest or rangeland resources.
The HFRA builds on community and resource protection activities
carried out under the National Fire Plan, and encourages local
communities to work with Federal agencies to develop Community Wildfire
Protection Plans. These plans assist local communities, as well as
State, Federal, and Tribal cooperators to clarify and refine
priorities, roles and responsibilities in the protection of life,
property, and critical infrastructure in the WUI. The BLM has developed
guidance and conducted workshops on the roles and responsibilities of
the BLM in the development of Community Wildfire Protection Plans. Thus
far in FY 2005, the Department has assisted 140 communities in
completing their Community Wildfire Protection Plans. Several counties
in western Oregon have used funds available under Title III of the
Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (P.L.106-393)
to begin the fuels assessments and Geographic Information Systems data
collection needed for these plans, and have recommended Title II
funding for projects to implement them.
The BLM began using the HFRA authorities in FY 2004 to expedite the
planning of new hazardous fuels reduction projects. Using HFRA
authorities in FY 2004, the BLM undertook fuels reduction activities on
some 1,500 acres and used HFRA in planning for out-year fuels reduction
projects. The BLM plans to use HFRA on some 9,000 acres of treatments
to be implemented in FY 2005, and will use HFRA in planning
approximately 20 fuels projects in FY 2005 and FY 2006.
In order to assist land managers in identifying areas at risk due
to the accumulation of hazardous fuels and to help prioritize hazardous
fuels reduction projects, the Department of the Interior and the Forest
Service are implementing a wildland vegetation mapping project known as
``LANDFIRE.'' The LANDFIRE project is a six-year, $40 million
interagency partnership sponsored by the Wildland Fire Leadership
Council. When complete, LANDFIRE will allow us to target those critical
acres for fuels treatment that will provide the maximum protection to
communities and other important resources identified by communities.
LANDFIRE will generate consistent, comprehensive, standardized,
landscape-scale maps and data describing vegetation, fire, and fuels
characteristics across the United States. It will provide spatial data
and predictive models needed by land and fire managers to prioritize,
evaluate, plan, complete, and monitor fuel treatment and restoration
projects. Additionally, LANDFIRE will improve hazardous fuels treatment
coordination between agencies and support implementation of the
National Fire Plan and the HFRA.
We believe that this capability is a vital tool for identifying and
mitigating risks identified in Community Wildfire Protection Plans. The
agencies are evaluating the use of prototype LANDFIRE data in helping
land managers and local communities collaboratively select fuels
treatment projects for FY 2006.
Title II--Utilization of Wood Biomass
Wood biomass is predominantly the by-product of hazardous fuels
removal projects that reduce the risk of wildland fire and improve
forest health. In June 2003, the Secretary of the Interior joined the
Secretaries of Agriculture and Energy in signing a Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU) that commits the Departments to support the
utilization of wood biomass by-products from restoration and fuels
treatment projects wherever ecologically, economically, and legally
appropriate, and consistent with locally developed land management
plans.
Early in 2004, Secretary Norton charged the Department and its
agencies with development of a coordinated biomass implementation
strategy. Interior agencies were directed to implement the interagency
MOU by April 2004. Under this direction, and using the authorities
provided in the HFI, the National Fire Plan, stewardship contracting,
and the HFRA, the BLM implemented its strategy for increasing biomass
utilization from BLM-managed lands. Stewardship contracts alone
produced nearly 30,000 tons of biomass in 2004, the first full year the
BLM had this authority.
A key provision in the MOU requires the BLM to encourage the
sustainable development and stabilization of wood biomass utilization
markets. Tamarisk and juniper removal is a priority and offers a real
opportunity to develop new biomass projects. To that end, we are
working closely with the Forest Service's Forest Products Lab in
Madison, Wisconsin. The BLM also is working to increase its use of bio-
based products, such as in mulch used to stabilize soils following
wildfire or in signs. In addition, the Department has several projects
in which local field offices are working with nearby communities to
increase biomass utilization. For example, in Oregon, the Bureau of
Indian Affairs has funded a study for the Confederated Tribes of the
Warm Springs to determine the feasibility of generating power from
available biomass, partially from BLM and Forest Service lands.
Finally, as noted earlier, the Department has issued an Interim Final
Rule to allow the option for biomass removal in land management service
contracts wherever ecologically appropriate and in accordance with the
law (60 FR 52607-52609). This will provide easier access to Federal
biomass supplies while we prepare the Final Rule.
Outlook
The authorities for expedited agency decision-making provided by
the HFI, stewardship contracting, and the HFRA, are helping the BLM to
expedite important projects to treat hazardous fuels, restore fire-
adapted ecosystems, restore healthy conditions to public forests and
rangelands, and reduce the threat of catastrophic wildland fire to at-
risk communities. While the BLM is using the HFRA to conduct fuels
treatment projects, much work remains. The BLM's field offices will
continue to learn from their experiences in implementing and seeking
the most effective ways to use all of the important authorities
provided by the Congress for Healthy Forests.
Conclusion
The BLM and Forest Service are achieving significant improvements
in the health of the public forests and rangelands. The agencies will
continue to work in partnership with other Federal agencies, as well as
State, local, and Tribal governments, to accomplish additional fuels
reduction and restoration projects. We appreciate your support. I would
be glad to answer any questions.
______
Mr. Walden. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Watson. We appreciate
it, and I appreciate you highlighting 3 of the 20 counties in
my district, work you are doing there.
Mr. Rey, welcome. We are delighted to have you here and we
welcome your testimony.
STATEMENT OF MARK REY, UNDER SECRETARY FOR NATIONAL RESOURCES
AND THE ENVIRONMENT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
Mr. Rey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for the
opportunity to testify on the Administration's progress in
implementing the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. I also want to
thank you and the members of this Subcommittee for your role in
the passage of the legislation and your continuing support for
our implementation efforts.
The President's Healthy Forest Initiative includes both the
Healthy Forest Restoration Act and administrative reforms that
have given Federal agencies new tools to reduce the risk of
severe wildland fires and restore forest and rangeland health.
The entirety of my statement for the record addresses the
various components of the hazardous fuel reduction program. The
Forest Service and the Department of the Interior agencies
accomplished 4.2 million acres of hazardous fuel reduction
during 2004, including 2.4 million acres in the wildland-urban
interface, and exceeded our program goals.
So far in 2005, about 919,000 acres have been treated. A
more complete accounting of our accomplishments in 2004 can be
found in the Healthy Forest Report located on the Internet at
www.HealthyForests.gov.
I agree with the discussion in the previous panel that the
more important measure is not gross acres but right acres, and
as you will see in my prepared statement, in 2005 97 percent of
the acres treated are priority acres, either acres within the
wildland-urban interface or acres at high risk outside the
wildland-urban interface agreed to as priority during the
collaborative process outlined in the National Fire Plan. So we
are moving toward treating a significant supermajority of the
right acres first.
I also want to point out that in Fiscal Year 2006 the
President's budget provides for more than 867 million proposed
for a variety of activities that will enable the departments to
continue our efforts to prevent the risk of catastrophic
wildfires and restore forest and rangeland health. We expect
these efforts to include utilizing the new legislative and
administrative tools provided under the Healthy Forest
Initiative.
Another important and related action is the authority
provided by Congress to expand the use of stewardship
contracting by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land
Management under the Omnibus Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year
2003. The Forest Service awarded 162 stewardship contracts and
agreements between Fiscal Years 1999 and 2004. 114 of these
have been awarded in the last two years alone.
We anticipate the use of this tool is likely to increase
with the release of four integrated resource contracts
specifically designated for stewardship contracting and with
the enactment of the Tribal Forest Protection Act, which also
was enacted by this committee's leadership last year.
As a result of two workshops held with the Intertribal
Timber Council, we are now receiving proposals from a wide
range of tribes to treat agency lands adjacent to tribal lands,
using tribal resources and authorities for that purpose.
The balance of my statement chronicles our progress in
implementing each of the titles of the Healthy Forest
Restoration Act. What I would like to do before we turn to
questions and answers is use a few graphics to show you the
progress made to date.
In Chart 1, you can see the acres of hazardous fuels
treated that have been treated from Fiscal Year 2000 through
2005, to date. The pink is in non-WUI acres, the blue is in
wildland-urban interface acres, and as you can see, over the
last couple of years wildland-urban interface acres have
increased as a proportion of the whole. Our progress to date in
2005 is significant inasmuch as we haven't entered the primary
operating season for 2005 yet to date.
If you want to look at the next chart for 2004, what you
can see is that in 2004 58 percent of the acres treated were
wildland-urban interface acres, 42 percent were non-wildland-
urban interface acres, and that includes, as I said earlier, a
number of high priority acres such as municipal watersheds
which are typically not found in the wildland-urban interface.
This is a breakdown of acres treated. If we were to break down
dollars expended, it would be skewed even more heavily to the
wildland-urban interface because the average per acre cost of
treatment in the wildland-urban interface is generally higher.
The next chart shows the breakdown between acres treated
using hazardous fuels dollars and acres--that would be the
blue--and acres treated using other appropriated accounts that
result in treatments that reduce wildfire risk on other high
priority lands. And as you can see, other program accounts are
making a significant contribution to implementation of the
Healthy Forest Initiative and the Healthy Forest Restoration
Act with 28 percent of the total being funded through those
accounts.
The next chart shows you our progress to date from both the
Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, breaking
down that progress between wildland-urban interface acres and
non-wildland-urban interface acres, and as you can see, we are
still in excess of 50 percent in wildland-urban interface
acres. Typically, early acres, that is, acres early in the
operating season, tend toward non-wildland-urban interface
acres because they tend heavily to spring burning acres in the
Southeast, which are typically not within the wildland-urban
interface to the same percentage and degree as mechanical acres
are as we get later into the season.
As far as the breakdown between prescribed fire and
mechanical acres, the next chart will show you that for Fiscal
Year 2005 to date. As you can see, this early in the season a
supermajority of the acres treated are through prescribed
burning. That will change as the season progresses and as we
get later into the season and into the operating season,
particularly in the west where we are going to be using a
heavier percentage of mechanical acres.
So with that, that is quite an overview of our progress to
date from 2000, and for 2005 to date. I would be happy to
respond to any of your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Rey follows:]
Statement of Mark Rey, Under Secretary for Natural Resources and the
Environment, U.S. Department of Agriculture
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the opportunity to testify on the
Administration's progress in implementing the Healthy Forests
Restoration Act of 2003 (HFRA). This important piece of legislation
received bipartisan support in both houses of Congress and was signed
into law by President Bush on December 3, 2003. I want to thank you and
the members of this subcommittee for your role in the passage of the
legislation and in your continuing support for our implementation
efforts.
THE HEALTHY FORESTS INITIATIVE
The President's Healthy Forests Initiative (HFI) includes both the
HFRA and administrative reforms that give federal agencies tools to
reduce the risk of severe wildland fires and restore forest and
rangeland health. The Act recognizes that critical fuels treatment and
forest and rangeland restoration projects have been unnecessarily
delayed by administrative procedures. This delay puts rural communities
and critical ecological resources at substantial risk from severe
wildland fire.
The HFRA complements administrative reforms that were put into
place previously. These reforms help expedite hazardous fuel treatments
and ecological restoration projects on federal land and have been
successfully implemented.
My statement will address the various components of the hazardous
fuel reduction program. First I want to state that the Forest Service
and the Department of the Interior (DOI) agencies accomplished 4.2
million acres of hazardous fuel reduction for 2004, including 2.4
million acres in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), and exceeded our
program goals. So far, in FY 2005 about 919,000 acres have been
treated. A more complete accounting of our accomplishments in 2004 can
be found in the Healthy Forests Report located on the internet at
www.HealthyForests.gov. I also want to point out that in the FY2006
President's Budget more than $867 million have been proposed for a
variety of activities that will enable the departments to continue our
efforts to prevent the risk of catastrophic wildfires and restore
forest and rangeland health.
We expect these efforts to include utilizing the new legislative
and administrative tools provided under the Healthy Forests Initiative.
The new administrative tools include:
Developed a new categorical exclusion under the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to facilitate implementation of
hazardous fuels treatment projects having minor environmental effects;
we plan to use this exclusion on 950 treatments in FY 2005;
Finalized Counterpart Regulations for Endangered Species
Section 7 consultation on National Fire Plan projects issued by the
Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service; this
has streamlined Section 7 consultations on these projects. The Forest
Service has entered into Alternative Consultation Agreements with the
services. Those agreements called for development of a training and
certification process which is now in place. Over 650 Forest Service
employees have been certified under that process;
Five pilot projects that applied new direction from the
Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) on conducting environmental
assessments under NEPA were completed and the Forest Service is working
with the Bureau of Land Management and CEQ to assess the results of the
process; and
The 2003 amendments to the Forest Service administrative
appeals regulations expanded the categories where emergency
determinations can be used in order to expedite project operations. (36
C.F.R. 215.10) That authority has been employed in several cases to
protect the government's interest in salvage timber projects, where the
value of dead or dying timber, such as in the aftermath of a fire,
diminishes over time. In three cases, the Department has prevailed,
thus far, against efforts to halt operations. In two of those cases,
the Ninth Circuit also declined to issue preliminary relief.
Another important and related action is the authority provided by
Congress to expand the use of stewardship contracting by the Forest
Service (FS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under the Omnibus
Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2003 (Section 323 of P.L. 108-7).
The Forest Service awarded 162 stewardship contracts and agreements
between Fiscal Years 1999 and 2004, 114 of these in the last two years
alone. We anticipate the use of this tool is likely to increase with
the release of four integrated resource contracts specifically designed
for stewardship contracting, and with the enactment of the Tribal
Forest Protection Act. As a result of two workshops held with the
Intertribal Timber Council we are now receiving proposals to treat
agency lands adjacent to tribal lands.
PROGRESS MADE ON IMPLEMENTING HFRA
In the time since Congress passed HFRA, the Departments have taken
a number of actions to implement each title of the Act including:
Title I -- Hazardous Fuels Reduction on Federal Lands
HFRA provides for the collaborative development and expedited
environmental analysis of authorized projects, a pre-decisional Forest
Service administrative review process, and other measures on National
Forest System and BLM lands that are at-risk of catastrophic fire. HFRA
focuses attention on four types of federal land: the wildland-urban
interfaces of at-risk communities, at-risk municipal water supplies,
land where threatened and endangered species or their habitats are at-
risk of catastrophic fire and where fuels treatment can reduce those
risks, and land where windthrow, or insect or disease epidemics
threaten an ecosystem component or forest and rangeland resources.
Restoring fire dependent ecosystems is the long-term solution to
reducing the harmful effects of catastrophic wildfire. The 10 Year
Implementation Plan continues to guide the agencies' priorities, and we
are placing our resources where we have the greatest risk, the most
capability, and highest efficiency. We know it is not possible to treat
all the acres in need; our goal is to treat the right acres in the
right place at the right time. Forest Service Chief, Dale Bosworth, and
DOI Assistant Secretary Lynn Scarlett issued joint national direction
to establish a collaborative process for prioritization and selection
of fuels treatment projects. This direction is consistent with the
performance measures established in the 10-Year Implementation Plan.
Specifically, we monitor the number of acres treated that are in the
WUI or outside the WUI in condition classes 2 or 3 in fire regimes 1, 2
or 3, and are identified as high priority through collaboration
consistent with the Implementation Plan. In FY 2005, 97% of Forest
Service proposed treatments are in these high priority areas.
Fire Management Plans have been completed for 99 percent of the
National Forests and National Grasslands. These plans follow an
interagency format, which provides an increased level of consistency
among federal agencies, facilitating local collaboration and increased
accomplishment on fuel treatment projects. Many of these new plans have
enabled wildland fire use for the first time or have substantially
increased the area where wildland fire use can be implemented.
Increasing wildland fire use will result in increases in inexpensive
fire use treatments in many areas.
The LANDFIRE project is a multi-partner ecosystem and fuel
assessment mapping project. It is designed to map and model vegetation,
fire, and fuel characteristics for the United States. The objective is
to provide consistent, nation-wide spatial data and predictive models
needed by land and fire managers to evaluate, prioritize, plan,
complete, and monitor fuel treatment and restoration projects. Two
prototypes, in Montana and Utah, will be completed this spring. A rapid
assessment of fire regime condition class at the mid scale is expected
to be completed this year. We expect national delivery of LANDFIRE
products to occur over the next 5 years with the western United States
due in 2006. These data will help agencies focus where the risk is the
greatest.
The HFRA encourages the development of Community Wildfire
Protection Plans to improve the strategic value of fuels treatments in
and around the WUI. Our partners, the National Association of State
Foresters, the Society of American Foresters, the National Association
of Counties, and the Western Governor's Association have prepared
guidance for at-risk communities on how they might prepare a Community
Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP). The state foresters are leading the
efforts to organize communities to draft CWPP's and report over 600
plans completed across the nation. For example, in Northeastern Oregon
the Oregon Department of Forestry is providing staff to facilitate and
document the development of CWPPs in partnership with the county
commissioners. The Forest Service and other federal agencies provide
technical support in fuels assessment, mapping and fire behavior
modeling.
Title II -- Utilization of Woody Biomass
Title II provides authority to help overcome barriers to the
production and use of woody biomass material produced on fuels
reduction and forest restoration projects. Title II contains three
focus areas: it amends the Biomass Research and Development Act of 2000
to provide for research on woody biomass production and treatment; it
amends the authority for the Rural Revitalization Through Forestry
program by providing for cooperation with the Forest Service Forest
Products Laboratory, and State and Private Forestry programs to
accelerate adoption of biomass technologies and market activities; and
it authorizes federal grants to facilities using biomass for wood-based
products to help offset the cost of the biomass.
The Departments of Agriculture, the Interior, and Energy have
signed a memorandum of understanding that lays the groundwork for the
interagency biomass committee to implement biomass projects. The FY
2004 grant solicitation process under the Biomass Research and
Development Act was modified to incorporate Section 201. This action
generated a significant increase in the number of woody biomass related
proposals received. USDA awarded over $6 million in 2004 as part of a
joint biomass research and development initiative with the Department
of Energy.
The Forest Service has new provisions in some timber sale, service,
and stewardship contracts that allow contractors the option to remove
woody biomass by-products from land management activities. This option,
where ecologically appropriate, will provide economic and social
benefits by creating jobs and conserving natural resources. Removal or
use of woody biomass will reduce smoke and emissions from prescribed
and natural fires, preserve landfill capacities, and reduce the threat
of catastrophic wildfires to communities and utilities.
The Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory published a request
for proposals in the Federal Register on February 10, 2005, looking for
creative solutions to address the nationwide challenge in dealing with
low-value material removed from hazardous fuel reduction efforts. Up to
$4.4 million will be available in 2005 to help improve utilization of,
and create markets for small-diameter material and low-valued trees
removed from hazardous fuel reduction activities. These funds are
targeted to help communities, entrepreneurs, and others turn residues
from hazardous fuel reduction projects into marketable forest products
and/or energy products. The President's FY 2006 Budget includes a $10
million request for capital improvements in our Forest Products Lab,
which has been a world leader in developing innovative products made
from wood and other forest materials.
Title III -- Watershed Forestry Assistance
Title III authorizes the Forest Service to provide technical,
financial and related assistance to private forest landowners aimed at
expanding their forest stewardship capacities and to address watershed
issues on non-Federal forested land and potentially forested land.
Title III also directs the Secretary to provide technical, financial
and related assistance to Indian tribes to expand tribal stewardship
capabilities to address watershed issues.
The Forest Service, working with State forestry agency personnel
and Tribal members, has developed separate draft guidelines to
implement the State and Tribal Watershed Forestry Assistance programs.
These draft guidelines will be published in the Federal Register for
public comment this summer.
Title IV -- Insect Infestations and Related Diseases
Title IV directs the Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to
establish an accelerated program to plan, conduct, and promote
systematic information gathering on insect pests, and the diseases
associated with them. This information will assist land managers in the
development of treatments and strategies to improve forest health; to
disseminate the results of such information and to carry out the
program in cooperation with scientists from colleges and universities
including forestry schools, governmental agencies and private and
industrial landowners.
The Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior announced during
the Forest Health Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas last summer the
formation of a series of partnerships to help implement the HFRA in the
southern United States. Among these are Forest Service partnerships
with southern universities and state forestry agencies to conduct two
landscape scale applied research projects on the Ozark-St. Francis
National Forest to address infestations of the southern pine beetle and
red oak borer, which threaten forest health in the region. The study
plans for these two projects have now been developed and peer reviewed
and the public involvement phase will be completed in March. Another
applied silvicultural assessment study plan for reducing mortality from
gypsy moth and oak decline on the Daniel Boone National Forest is
nearing completion. The Forest Service also has two projects on Hemlock
Woolly Adelgid in North Carolina and on the genetic diversity of
Western White Pine.
Title V -- The Healthy Forest Reserve Program
Title V directs USDA to establish a program for private landowners
to promote the recovery of threatened and endangered species, improve
biodiversity and enhance carbon sequestration. Title V authorizes the
Secretary of Agriculture to acquire 30-year or 99-year easements (not
to exceed 99 years), or utilize 10-year cost-share agreements on
qualifying lands. The Secretary may enroll up to two million acres
depending on appropriations. Title V also contains provisions allowing
the Secretary to make safe harbor or similar assurances to landowners
who enroll land in the program and whose conservation activities result
in a net conservation benefit for listed, candidate, or other species.
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has been
designated to administer the Healthy Forest Reserve Program in
coordination with the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and
the National Marine Fisheries Service, and is in the process of
drafting rules to implement the title.
Title VI -- Forest Inventory/Monitoring and Early Warning Systems
Title VI directs the Secretary of Agriculture to carry out a
program to monitor forest stands on some National Forest System lands
and private lands to improve detection of and response to environmental
threats.
The Forest Service announced in October, 2004 a national strategy
to prevent and control the threat of invasive species and non-native
plants in the United States. The strategy focuses on four key elements:
preventing invasive species from entering the country; finding new
infestations before they spread; containing and reducing existing
infestations and restoring native habitats and ecosystems. The strategy
will rely on ``The Early Warning System for Forest Health Threats in
the United States,'' developed as part of HFRA, which describes for the
first time, in one place, the nation's system for identifying and
responding to forest health threats, including web sites to obtain
further information.
The Forest Service also conducted a rapid detection pilot survey of
invasive bark beetles in 10 port cities in FY 2004 and has increased
the number of surveyed sites to 40 in FY 2005. Based upon early
detection results from FY 2004, we are initiating a rapid response to
an orthotomicus beetle found in California which will include more
extensive trapping and delimiting of this potentially destructive
nonnative pest.
Additionally, the Forest Service is establishing two threat
assessment centers in Prineville, OR and Ashville, NC to develop use
oriented technology and cutting edge research on invasive species.
These centers will develop predictive models that integrate all of the
threats to forest health such as insects, pathogens, fire, air
pollution and weather. Results will help prioritize where treatments
should occur and the ecological, environmental and social costs of not
doing necessary treatments.
OUTLOOK FOR FUTURE IMPLEMENTATION OF HFRA
We expect to continue to make headway into treating hazardous fuels
to restore fire adapted ecosystems and to help make communities safer.
Although we recognize that HFI and HFRA authorities are helping to
restore healthy forest and rangeland ecosystems we have much work ahead
of us. We need to solve the problem that much of the woody material
removed in fuels treatment projects is below merchantable size and is
very expensive to treat. We need to improve the public's understanding
that it is appropriate to do mechanical treatment that removes
merchantable trees. What is important is that we are leaving a
healthier, more resilient forest on the landscape.
We need continued bipartisan congressional support of these
hazardous fuels reduction efforts, and need to expand our capacity to
treat more with less, using biomass utilization, stewardship
contracting, and other activities. Homeowners need to continue to take
responsibility for treating hazardous fuels on their own lands by
taking action through the FIREWISE program, which helps people who live
or vacation in fire-prone areas educate themselves about wildland fire
protection. Homeowners can learn how to protect their homes with a
survivable space and how to landscape their yard with fire resistant
materials.
CONCLUSION
Mr. Chairman, the new authorities are proving to be very helpful in
our efforts to make significant improvements to the health of this
country's forests and rangelands. We will continue to work with our
other Federal, State, Tribal and local partners to accomplish this. We
appreciate your support. I would be happy to answer any questions the
committee members may have.
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Mr. Walden. Thank you, Mr. Rey. One of the questions that
came up in our hearing--it seems like a week ago, but I think
it was yesterday--on biofuels, was the notion that the
stewardship contracts at 10 years simply are not long enough
for those who would like to participate or join in the process
to be able to purchase the equipment and know they will have a
steady supply and a guarantee to enter into creation of new
biomass facilities.
Have you looked at the option of maybe having us extend
those contracts out, say, to 20 years or something, to really
gin up this market and to create certainty for private sector
investment? Is that something that you are hearing, or a
concern that is being raised?
Mr. Rey. I have not heard that concern, but it is a logical
concern to be raised depending on the size of the capital
investment that is being considered in order to use low value
material. The larger the capital investment required, the
longer the amortization schedule that the investor would like.
The longer contract provides them to engage a lender in
negotiating a longer amortization schedule for whatever loans
and investments thereafter get to be made. So it is logical
that a longer contract term would be beneficial in that regard.
On the other hand, both the General Services Administration
and the Office of Management Budget are very wary of the
Government signing on to long-term contracts in that that
increases the uncertainty associated with what the Government
is committing as well as any downstream liability if
circumstances on the ground change, so that is a balance that
has to be struck.
We have had some 10-year contracts issue in the past year,
and those have resulted in some new investments and new
infrastructure that have occurred, and so we have had some
investors who have been willing to do that.
Mr. Walden. Would it work to give you the authority to go
up to 20 years but not mandate that they be 20, to give
flexibility then in certain circumstances?
Mr. Rey. Sure. It would give us more flexibility. We would
have to put a lot more reopeners for a lot more contingencies
in a contract of that length, and you could only tell for
certain whether that is helpful once we actually completed a
contract negotiation with an individual contractor.
Mr. Walden. Let me move on. I have a couple other questions
in the time that remains. One of them, as you know, Mr. Rey, I
have talked to you personally about and have a real commitment
to managing the HFRA acreage at the--I want to know forest by
forest how HFRA is being utilized, if it is. Do you have the
ability to hold your local line officers accountable for using
the new authorities in HFRA at that level and then being able
to report back to the committee? Because I also want to know is
it working or not, or are they stumbling into problems that we
need to address, or are they not using it, or are they using it
fully?
Mr. Rey. I think the short answer is they are using it
generally very well. We do have the ability and are holding
them accountable to it, and we do have the ability to report on
their progress on a forest by forest basis, and I have a
printout that I will submit for the committee's record for the
hearing today on progress to date on each national forest.
Mr. Walden. Thank you.
Mr. Rey. What you will find when you look at the printout
is about what you would expect, that is, the majority of
forests are using the new authorities, both HFRA and HFI
authorities. There are a few forests that haven't gotten to it
yet. Those are forests that by and large have circumstances
that don't necessarily make this as high a priority, or
specific tools as useful in their circumstances, and as you
would guess, those are mostly forests in the Northeast.
Mr. Walden. I have two more questions in a minute 20, so I
will try and keep them brief. Under HFRA Title I projects, do
you have any idea how many of those are being litigated and how
that compares to fuels reduction projects that are non-HFRA?
Mr. Rey. We haven't been implementing HFRA projects long
enough to get a good sample set to know whether they are going
to be litigated any more or less frequently than other
projects, and that is because we did the first generation of
HFRA projects last summer. They are moving to completion now.
The appeals process is completed. Now litigation is going to
start. A few of them have been litigated to be sure, but I
don't think we have enough data to make a comparison between
those and--
Mr. Walden. But you are finding less litigation under HFRA
or more?
Mr. Rey. Still too early to say. I would say about the
same. I would say that generally speaking, the rate of
challenges of fuels projects has been increasing to some
extent, but our success rate in defending them has been
increasing as well.
Mr. Walden. One final question because I know it is one
many of us on this Subcommittee were involved in last year, and
that is the issue of firefighting and especially the issue of
the air tankers. I have recently seen in the press some Western
Governors have expressed their interest as well. Can you just
give us a brief update maybe, each on you, on the air tanker
and firefighting process we see unfolding for this summer?
Mr. Rey. I think the first thing to note is that last year,
with a limited number of large air tankers for a portion of the
year, our success rate at extinguishing fires at initial attack
was superior to 2003. In 2003 we succeeded in extinguishing
98.3 percent of all ignitions on initial attack. Last year we
succeeded in extinguishing 99 percent of all ignitions on
initial attack. That success in extinguishing 70 additional
fires--that is what it amounts to, 70 additional fires that did
not escape--saved us on the average $22 million in fire
suppression costs.
So our projections about the success of a modified fleet
with a heavier reliance on helicopters and single-engine
tankers appears to have been well founded.
Now, that having been said, there is, as we have said in
hearings before, still a role for the large fixed-wing air
tankers, and we have RFPs out already to begin to contract with
them for this year. In response to the initial RFP we will be
putting I the air we believe nine P-3 Orions. That is the one
model that we have established operational life limits for. We
have ongoing studies to try to establish--I think we will
succeed in establishing operational life limits for the P-2Vs
and the DC4s, 6s and 7s. That work will be completed on or
about June 1st. Once it is completed, we will review each of
those other aircraft and return those aircraft that are within
their operational life limit to the fleet and stand down other
aviation assets like helicopters that are more expensive to
operate.
One of the other things we found this year is that as a
consequence of the conflict over the aging fixed-wing air
tanker fleet, our helicopter contractors are beginning to
adjust their equipment and technologies to improve the
efficiencies or large heli-tankers and type 1 helicopters such
that through new technological developments they have increased
their range and effectiveness.
So we are pretty confident, actually I should say we are
very confident that however the review of the remaining fixed-
wing air tankers turns out, we will field an adequate aerial
operation to continue the rate of success that we have enjoyed
so far.
Mr. Walden. Ms. Watson, do you have any comment on that?
Ms. Watson. No, I don't really have anything to add because
we work very closely with the Forest Service on air tankers.
Mr. Walden. All right. Thank you very much.
I now turn to my colleague, Mr. Udall.
Mr. Tom Udall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Under Secretary Rey, we all appreciate the tight budgets we
face, and while the Forest Service is devoting more funding to
hazardous fuels reduction, it falls far short of what was
authorized in the Healthy Forest bill and what has been
identified as short-term needs by the agencies. When this issue
has been raised, your response has typically been that the
streamlining of environmental review and new stewardship
contracting authority would reduce the cost of thinning
projects, allowing the agency to cover more acres with less
money.
With these stewardship contracts, in particular goods-for-
service contracts, will employers be obligated to pay the
prevailing wage as required under Davis-Bacon and the Service
Contract Act?
Mr. Rey. Where there is a prevailing wage for these kinds
of activities under Davis-Bacon, the Federal Service Contract
Act will require that the contractors pay those. There are some
instances where the activities that are being contracted for do
not have a prevailing wage under Davis-Bacon, and so the
Service Contract Act would not apply.
I would also, however--
Mr. Tom Udall. Where would those areas be?
Mr. Rey. Those will be--it won't be geographic so much as
functional. There are some land management functions which do
not have a Davis-Bacon prevailing wage established for them,
some of the general contracting functions. But for others,
including the ones that are most common, there is a Davis-Bacon
prevailing wage, and that would be required in these contracts.
I do, however, want to take slight issue with the
proposition that we have failed to fully fund the Healthy
Forest Restoration Act. The authorization in Title I of the Act
calls for $760 million in authorization to carry out, one,
activities authorized under the Title, and two, other hazardous
fuel reduction activities of the Secretary, including making
grants to States, local governments, Indian tribes and other
eligible recipients for activities authorized by law.
As we put together the Fiscal Year 2005 budget, as we often
do when Congress enacts new legislation, we put together a
cross-cut of what the Department of Interior and what the
Forest Service were spending for all of the activities
described in this authorization. And in 2005 we requested a
total of $761 million or thereabouts. This year we are
requesting--an appropriation, I am sorry--of 867 million. So
whether this is enough or not enough, or too much or too
little, or in the right places or the wrong places, is a
discussion we can and will have probably at this hearing and
during your budget oversight hearing, but we have provided a
responsible response to the authorization level of the Healthy
Forest Restoration Act is something I think that we have done.
Mr. Tom Udall. You talked a little bit about tribes in your
testimony. A study by the Center for Watershed and Company
Health by the University of Oregon, I believe, found that the
Native American tribes needed increased access to training, to
funding, resources and technical assistance for fire protection
and fuels reduction. What is the Forest Service doing to
improve getting these resources to Native American tribes?
Mr. Rey. We are working with the tribes now through the
authorization provided in the Tribal Forest Protection Act that
the committee passed last summer to begin to work with tribes
to design fuels reduction projects in areas of joint tribal and
Federal ownership. Part and parcel of that is going to be to
work with the tribes to design the project to retain tribal
members and contractors to do the work and to train them to do
the work as we go forward.
Ms. Watson. I would add that we also had a series of
training meetings throughout Indian country in about three or
four different places, in Spokane, in New Mexico, and then
there was a recent one in California, to train tribes in
biomass utilization. This is a strong interest of theirs that
combines the interest in taking care of their timberlands at
the same time as providing a source of renewable energy. So
that is another training effort that Interior, Agriculture
Department and BIA have worked on together.
Mr. Tom Udall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Peterson. [Presiding] The gentleman from Arizona is
recognized.
Mr. Hayworth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Watson, Mr. Rey, thanks for coming.
I am glad to see my friend from Pennsylvania in the chair.
I was going to address my remarks to the gentleman from Oregon.
And Ms. Watson, I thought it was rather ingenious to bring
those projects that happened to be in Oregon. I, as you might
suspect, have a little more interest in Arizona, and I wonder
if you could elucidate more on the status of work there.
Ms. Watson. I don't have any specific examples on Arizona.
Mr. Hayworth. Oh, gee, well--
Ms. Watson. I am sorry.
Mr. Hayworth. That is OK. Actually, Mr. Chairman, I have a
good report from today's Arizona Republic, and I have it right
here. A new wildfire plan calls for thinning and burning higher
density stands of ponderosa pine and smaller vegetation spread
across thousands of acres of the Kaibab National Forest. The
plan is primarily a blueprint for what could happen if the
State or Federal Government were to award funds under the
Federal Healthy Forest Restoration Act. The plan's drafters,
which include the City of William, several fire districts and
the State Land Department. The proposal reaches across almost
250,000 acres of primarily public land.
So there is a little good news I can add from the home
State paper if you will, and of course look forward in writing,
we will get some more projects there.
But I wanted to thank you. I know Mr. Rey always keeps up
with the projects around.
Ms. Watson. They manage a little bit more land in your
State than my agency does.
Mr. Hayworth. A little bit more land, yes. Indeed.
Mr. Rey. What you will see in the spreadsheet that I am
giving you for each national forest is that all of the national
forests in Arizona have a number of projects under way.
Probably the most significant, in addition to the one that you
mentioned on the Coconino is the large-scale landscape-scale
stewardship contract that was signed on the Apache-Sitgreaves
National Forest last October to treat about 150,000 acres over
a 10-year period. That is one of the contracts with a long time
span that is resulting in some increased infrastructure
investment to utilize the low value material that is being
produced to treat those acres, which are for the most part
acres that have been identified and selected through community
based fire protection plans within the wildland-urban interface
for the towns of Show Low and the nearby communities.
Mr. Hayworth. Speaking of Show Low, and in the wake of the
Rodeo-Chediski fire, now several years ago, and as Co-Chair of
the Native American Caucus, I was pleased to hear about the
efforts made with the various tribes, because what we learned
in Rodeo-Chediski as the fire approached Show Low, really the
treatment done by the White Mountain Apaches knocked down that
fire. The treatment there on their tribal lands, in stark
contrast to where we had seen by injunction and other edicts a
failure to see the same type of treatment carried out on non-
reservation lands, the contrast could not have been greater. So
I am hearted to hear, and as you offered in your testimony, the
involvement of the tribes and coordination from your respective
agencies with the tribes.
A couple of things that transpired here, and perhaps it is
more philosophy of government, my friend from New Mexico asked
about Davis-Bacon and prevailing wages. When we are trying to
summon and make dollars go further and stretch things, are
Davis-Bacon requirements, such as they exist, an impediment or
is there a way to estimate the cost involved vis-a-vis what
work is really done? In other words, however noble the intent
of Davis-Bacon legislation may be, does it eat up resources
that could otherwise be used in--
Mr. Rey. I don't think we have seen it to be an impediment
so far. In those categories where the Department of Labor has
developed prevailing wages under Davis-Bacon, particularly
general construction categories, you are competing in a broad
wage pool for workers. You are not going to get very far, I
don't think, trying to shave off the rate that you would pay
because you are just going to be competing against other sector
contractors for that.
Now, much of the land improvement work that goes into these
stewardship contracts involves things that the Department of
Labor hasn't established a prevailing wage for, so Davis-Bacon
doesn't apply. But where there is a prevailing wage, I don't
think it has been a great impediment to us.
Mr. Hayworth. Good. Thank you for the insight there, and
again, I appreciate very much your testimony.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Peterson. Thank you.
Mr. DeFazio from Oregon?
Mr. DeFazio. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Rey, I am just curious in looking at the data provided,
the Healthy Forests Report, December 6. The total utilization
was--you said you were going to give us the forest by forest
breakdown on the utilization of HFRA. I appreciate that and I
will look forward to that, but I am curious. There were 107
projects where it was used for EA and EIS authority. How many
projects total were conducted last year? That is probably
about, is that 10 percent or less of the projects?
Mr. Rey. That is about 10 percent.
Mr. DeFazio. OK, because I was looking at the acreage. That
is about 10 percent of the acreage.
Mr. Rey. That is about right, and you will see as we go on
an increasing percentage consumed by HFRA and HFI authorities.
Mr. DeFazio. But obviously then, 90 percent of the projects
which didn't utilize the EA and EIS exemptions were still able
to go forward?
Mr. Rey. Eventually. Those projects--
Mr. DeFazio. Will you be able to show us, say, date first
proposed? I mean will you be able to give us some sort of a
chart on that that will show?
Mr. Rey. Yes. As we get a larger data base of HFRA and HFI
projects, one of the things we will want to show you is whether
the HFRA and HFI authorities have shortened timeframes to bring
a project to completion. I think by this time next year we will
have a data base large enough to be meaningful. Right now it is
so small I think it may be unrevealing insofar as the number of
projects are concerned.
Remember, most of the projects that were carried out in
2004 were projects that were designed in 2003 or 2002 or 2001,
well before HFI and HFRA were even in existence.
Mr. DeFazio. Right. You heard the previous panel and the
discussion that they felt with proper planning prioritization
we could productively spend larger sums, up to 1.4 billion a
year for a number of years to try and get ahead of the problem,
and they said the kind of expenditure levels they think maybe
we are keeping even or falling behind in terms of fuel
accumulation. I know you have your OMB masters probably
listening, but can you comment on that?
Mr. Rey. Yes. I think whether my OMB masters are listening
or not is probably not that important because there is a merit
to this. The merit is that we have to do three things in order
to be successful in attacking this problem.
First is we have to establish clear priorities of what the
right treatment, the right time and the right place is and
agree on that. And second, we have to be able to reduce our
unit costs for doing these treatments. And then third, we have
to continue to increase our investment in this area.
The first of those, as the GAO also indicated, is something
we are now completing, and as a result of the confusion between
what they were suggesting and what they meant, which they
clarified, I think we will be easily in a position within the
next couple weeks to give you a timeframe for when we are going
to complete the cohesive strategy and the underlying LANDFIRE
and forest planning analysis components that have to go into
that cohesive strategy.
I think what you will see in that timeline is that we agree
with GAO that that is important to submit as part of the budget
request and something that we can submit as part of the 2007
budget request. Once we have that completed, then we will know
that we are treating the right acres in the right place in the
right time.
Second, with another year's experience, we are going to
know what our unit costs are looking like. One area in
particular that we have to continue to look at is why are
mechanical treatments in the wildland-urban interface still so
expensive? If everyone agrees that the wildland-urban interface
should be treated, then arguably we ought to be able to look at
our planning and analysis costs and begin to step back from
some of those in the interest of getting more of that treated.
Mr. DeFazio. If I could, we are about to run out of time.
You pointed out though that the early attack, suppression
activities had tremendous cost/benefit ratio or savings this
year. I am very supportive of early attack efforts. Are you
going to develop any measures similar in terms of potential
avoided costs in determining where to prioritize the money,
wildland-urban interface versus more distant resource
protection?
Mr. Rey. We can develop avoided costs from the standpoint
of our firefighting costs, and that is what I gave you with
that $22 million savings. The avoided costs we can't give you
because it would purely speculative, are damages associated
with fires and escape.
Mr. DeFazio. One other, and I realize my time has expired,
but in terms of the fleet, there are two follow-ups I would
like to hear and we don't necessarily have time now, but if you
could follow up. I know last year we were looking at the
potential for an expanded fixed-wing fleet with some potential
retirement of P-3s where we did have military--they had been
with one entity and we did have service records. I would like
to understand where we are in that.
The other thing is I met some people from Evergreen in
Oregon last weekend, and they are completing certification
testing of a 747 tanker, which obviously would--you are not
going to be flying it up narrow canyons, but it could have some
applicability in certain areas, and I would also be curious
what discussions are ongoing there, whether they will be
eligible to contract or not with you. So perhaps you could
follow up, have your staff or something follow up at my office
afterwards.
Mr. Rey. Sure.
Mr. DeFazio. And then finally, Mr. Chairman, if I could, I
have yet not figured how to be in more than one place at a
time, despite my tenure in Congress. I want to apologize in
advance to the next panel, and particularly to Ms. Tucker from
my home town of Springfield, because I do have to go to another
meeting, and I will miss her testimony, but she met with my
staff and I will be kept apprised of what other issues she
raises.
Thank you.
Mr. Walden. [Presiding.] Thank you. Thanks for those
questions. I would be interested, too, as well. I think all of
the committee members were on the questions Mr. DeFazio raised.
Just a heads up. We do have a third panel, and we are
expecting votes any time, and I am led to believe there may be
as many as four--four or five.
Mr. Peterson?
Mr. Peterson. Thank you. I would like to welcome both of
you and thank you for your participation today. I especially
want to thank Mark for your trip to the ANF recently. It was
appreciated. Communities were happy to see someone from your
level come and view the Allegheny National Forest and its
particular needs.
I know you have tried to realize the Healthy Forest
Initiative to assist. In 2003, the last two years, I mean, the
problems in the East are much different than the problems in
the West. It is a hardwood forest--basically, cherry, oak and
maple are the major species--predominantly cherry on ANF, very
high concentration, and we've had now two of the wettest
seasons maybe on record. And our water table is as high as I've
ever seen it. I mean, our rivers are running bank full most of
the time, streams bank full, and we just keep getting rain. In
fact, last week we lost most of our snowpack, and so there is
water everywhere.
But the vulnerability of a hardwood forest is--especially
the cherry--is these trees are approaching 90 to 100 years in
age. They don't live to be 1,000 years old. They don't live to
be 500 years old. This is a tree that matures maybe 90 to 100
years and then starts to deteriorate. And what we are finding
with the very shallow root structure of a cherry tree, when it
is as wet as it is, they are very vulnerable at just tipping
over. And then, right now, if we would get heavy wins, we would
have a lot more of the Allegheny National Forest on the ground.
We have a lot of it on the ground from 2003, and I guess our
frustration has been is what we need to do to somehow, in the
future, be able to harvest that that ends up on the ground
because I know of one cherry tree on private land that blew
down that netted $29,000. Cherries bring in about $3 a board
foot, and this was a tree that had four veneer, high-quality
veneer logs in it, which is very unusual, it is an exception,
but it is not uncommon to have logs worth many thousands of
dollars. So it is a high-value forest. It is our resources
lying on the ground being consumed by the insects rather than--
Do we need a special initiative for Eastern hardwood
forests that are a whole different species?
Mr. Rey. Well, what we attempted to do in spring of 2004,
in response to the 2003 blow-down, was to look at whether we
could use some of the categorical exclusions that were
developed in the spring of 2003, under the Healthy Forests
Initiative, to do some of the treatments on the Allegheny.
We did work with the Fish and Wildlife Service to vet and
resolve some Endangered Species Act concerns involving the
Indiana bat and I think succeeded in modifying the treatments
that we were going to do to resolve their concerns and
thereafter use the categorical exclusions. Unfortunately, the
use of those categorical exclusions and the projects that were
scheduled to be carried out under them are now in litigation,
and we will have to do our best to justify our approach and to
prevail in the litigation.
Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the
likelihood is, by the time the litigation is complete, our
victory will be pyrrhic because, as you indicate, the value of
particularly veneer-quality cherry deteriorates once the
material is on the ground and particularly once the insects
begin to work it over. So I doubt, by the time that we move
these trees, if the courts agree with us in the utilization of
this authority, that we will be getting $5 a board foot for the
quality of material that we are going to extract, and that is
unfortunate because that is a waste of a valuable resource that
would have been a substitute in the general market for tropical
hardwoods because that is what cherry basically is. It is a
high-quality veneer that is used in the same application as
mahogany, teak and all of the other things that are being
pulled out of the Amazon Basin or any other part of the world
in the tropics where forest management is not practiced with
the kind of sensitivity that we do it, but that is the way it
is.
If we win this lawsuit, then we will sustain our position,
and perhaps if you have another blow-down this winter, which is
probably likely, given the amount of rain that you have had, it
will not take winds much in excess of about 25 miles an hour to
start knocking down trees. Perhaps we will be able to do a
better job on this year's blow-down, but that is the sense of
it.
Beyond that, given the authorities that we have, that
looked to be the best mix available, but you have correctly
identified a fairly generic problem on that forest, which is
that the age class of the forest is reaching the age at which
cherry begins to deteriorate. It is a predominantly cherry
forest. It will not be 20 or 30 years from now a predominantly
cherry forest. Left to its own devices, it will change over to
maple or, on the drier sites, oak because that would be the
natural progression of things.
Mr. Peterson. We have had trouble regenerating oak. Oak is
not generated as well. That has been one of our problems. The
original forest was beach and hemlock. Unfortunately, we are
losing our beach as we speak. With the beach bark disease, we
are just basically losing our beach. So I do not know what it
will end up being, a lot of it very, species not very
desirable. It has been very frustrating to the communities
that--and I guess the value of it as a Federal Government that
could be receiving funds to further fund the treatment in the
West. I mean, it is a very valuable resource and to just not be
able to take those dollars and put them in the Treasury doesn't
make a lot of sense. Nobody really wins, in my view, but we
appreciate your personal attention to it and look forward to
working with you.
Mr. Rey. With all due respect to your Western colleagues,
the Allegheny National Forest has the most valuable trees in
the system because of the value of high-quality, of veneer-
quality cherry, and it becomes something that we can use on a
sustainable basis to replace teak or mahogany.
Mr. Peterson. That is right. Thank you.
Mr. Walden. Clearly, he has forgotten we, also, have
oversight over his budget. A 25-mile-an-hour wind, where I am
from, is hardly noticed. It is a breeze in the Columbia Gorge.
Mr. Udall, you are our final questioner.
Mr. Mark Udall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for
being late. I know this is some important testimony, and I want
to welcome both of you here today. Mr. Rey, I do have to note
that Mr. Walden and I are much more comfortable up here asking
you the questions, unlike the situation in which we found
ourselves three weeks ago, where you were asking us the
questions.
More seriously, that was a very well-attended, as you know,
and I think important event, commemorating 100 years of the
Forest Service.
Mr. Rey. Thank you both for participating.
Mr. Mark Udall. I am not sure everybody in my family
appreciated seeing us on C-SPAN over and over again, but our
timing was right.
I am going to be brief because I know the next panel has
some important information to share with us, so I had one
question I wanted to direct to both of you.
We are going to hear in the next panel from Dr. Gregory,
Lisa Gregory, who is a Coloradan, and who works on these issues
for the Wilderness Society. And she says that a budget line
item for collaboration would help in implementing that part of
the new law. What, Ms. Watson and Mr. Rey, do you think of that
proposal?
Ms. Watson. Well, I just got back from a day-and-a-half in
New Mexico meeting with NGO's, including a colleague of the
next witness from the Wilderness Society, and others speaking
about collaboration and what we can do better, and we left that
meeting considerably more optimistic on how we can improve our
collaborative process in the National Fire Plan.
Some specific items we agreed to were taking a look at our
performance measures, to improve those, to enhance
collaboration, looking at the WFLC meetings that we have--the
Wildland Fire Leadership Council--to open those up, make those
more transparent. And I think that there are some things that
we can do.
In my remarks, I likened collaboration to it is another
form of communication, and we know in our own marriages and in
our work relationships that communication is always a problem,
and it is something that needs constant nurturing and a
constant attention. And I think here we have built a good
process the GAO identified in its report that we have really
improved the collaborative relationship, but we need to do
better. And we left that meeting committed to doing better. I
had a number of folks come up to me afterwards from the NGO
community feeling that they had been heard and that things
would improve. So that would be my response.
Mr. Mark Udall. Your sense, then, it would be helpful to at
least consider a line item that focuses on collaboration so
that we--
Ms. Watson. I think more it is a focus of folk's attention,
I think, performance measures. I don't know that a line item
would be the appropriate way to do it. I think performance
measures, where individual Federal employees' performance is
measured on their attention to collaboration might be a better
motivator, honestly. I think that is a better way to do it. And
at the SES level, at the DOI, our top managers are managed and
rewarded on their collaboration of their attention to ``Four
C's,'' and I think that motivates individual folks. And if we
could bring that down to field-level staff, in the context of
the National Fire Plan, I think that would work.
Mr. Rey. What we could do for the Subcommittee is just ask
our program people to parse out what they think we are spending
on collaborative activities and submit that to you for the
record so you get a sense of what the investment has been.
But the Forest Service as well, we do establish a priority
on collaboration in the selection of projects. That is one of
the guides that we use to select priority projects, is there a
collaborative mechanism that the project came forward from. It
is also something that we put into performance reviews for
senior managers, and it is something that we provide a reward
structure for when it is done successfully.
Mr. Walden. Well, a follow-on to Mr. Rey and Ms. Watson
would be to make the suggestion that you have a single point of
contact in each agency to look at collaborative opportunities,
and it sounds, in part, you are already doing that, but maybe
that is another idea to put in the mix.
I know when I travel in the mountainous regions in my
district, which are not insignificant, representing Clear
Creek, and Grand, and Eagle and Summit, as well as Gilpin
Counties--half the ski areas, for example, in Colorado are in
my district--in those subdivisions that are now tucked away in
a lot of these mountain areas, there is immense interest in
those groups moving ahead with the kind of support that might
be available to them. And anything we can do to continue and
encourage that, I would urge you to take a look at. I know it
is a part of collaborations, and what we are talking about is
working with groups that have the expertise like the Wilderness
Society, but this is another form of collaboration as well.
Thank you, and I look forward to working with you on this
important issue as it unfolds.
Mr. Walden. Thank you. I want to thank our panel for not
only your work within the agencies, I know it is difficult, but
you are making great progress, but also for your work with this
committee, and we look forward to continuing this conversation
on this and other issues affecting the health of our forests
and range lands. We have a lot of work to do, we are doing a
lot of work, but there is obviously more. So thank you very
much.
We will now move on to our third panel and hopefully at
least get the testimony from our panelists before they call us
for votes. Our third panel, we have James Cummins, Executive
Director of the Mississippi Fish and Wildlife Foundation; Lena
Tucker, Society of American Foresters from the great State of
Oregon; and Lisa Dale Gregory from The Wilderness Society.
Let us go ahead and at least start on testimony. If you can
go ahead and take your seats, we will start with Mr. Cummins.
Welcome. That bell you heard, that terrible buzzing sound,
means we are going to have to go for votes. Perhaps we can get
through at least your testimony, if not, perhaps, one other.
Go ahead.
STATEMENT OF JAMES L. CUMMINS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
MISSISSIPPI FISH AND WILDLIFE FOUNDATION
Mr. Cummins. Chairman Walden, Ranking Member Udall, and
members of the committee, I certainly appreciate the
opportunity to be here today and speak to you on behalf of the
Healthy Forests Restoration Act and, specifically, on one of
the titles that deals with private lands.
We have worked hard in assisting Congress in passing this
legislation, and, Chairman Walden, we certainly appreciate your
efforts, and many of us in the conservation community are very
glad with what you have done for the Healthy Forests
Restoration Act.
Mr. Walden. We couldn't have done it without your help.
Thank you.
Mr. Cummins. Thank you.
I am here today as a certified fisheries biologist, a
certified wildlife biologist, as well as a private landowner. I
spent last weekend doing some controlled burning on our own
family's land that has been in our family since 1833.
In the Southeast, healthy forests comprise much more than
just forest management and fire prevention on public lands.
According to the Forest Service, nationwide public forests
compromise 42 percent of our land mass, and private forests
comprise 58 percent. Private forests, also, provide 89 percent
of our Nation's timber harvest, and the South alone provides 60
percent of this, making it the largest producer of timber of
any other country in the world. And while our Nation depends so
heavily on these private forests for wood products, we also
depend on them to provide many other services, such as Habitat
for Threatened and Endangered Species and carbon sequestration.
We expect a lot from private forest landowners, but we
rarely think about how they can afford to continue to provide
these services. It is a cost that usually can only be recovered
through selling timber or divesting of land. And while this may
be possible for some landowners, many small-and medium-sized
ones find it impossible to provide this habitat in these other
services. It is for these reasons that the Healthy Forest
Restoration Act included Title V, the Healthy Forest Reserve
Program.
It is estimated that private lands provide 90 percent of
our Nation's listed species. And as I came in the door this
morning, I saw three panels outside listing the 1,264 species
that are found here in the U.S.
Nationwide, the South has the largest percentage of these
listed species. Eight of the top ten States and territories
with the most listings are in the South. They include Alabama,
Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia
and Puerto Rico. There are many rare forest ecosystems that
exist largely on private lands, and they require financial
incentives for restoration. The States with the greatest forest
ecosystem laws are Florida, California, Hawaii, Georgia, North
Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and
Tennessee. You may notice that this almost mirrors the list
with the most listed species.
To give you a good example of what I am referring to,
across the Southern Coastal Plain, the longleaf pine ecosystem
once covered approximately 80 million acres. Now, it covers
only 3, and this ecosystem is one of the most diverse
ecosystems in North America, with over 20 federally listed
species. Each of you should have a copy of our Longleaf Pine
Management Handbook, and it will give you a practical example
of how the Healthy Forests Reserve Program should work.
Many years ago, in 1934, Aldo Leopold, who is regarded as
the Father of Wildlife Management, stated, ``Conservation will
ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who
conserves the public interests.'' The Healthy Forests Reserve
Program does just that. It combines some of the most successful
components of programs like the Conservation and Wetland
Reserve Program that this Congress has passed, and they help
pay and provide incentives to landowners for habitat
restoration.
I am pleased to see that the Natural Resources Conservation
Service will administer the Healthy Forests Reserve Program.
Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries
will, also, be involved. NRCS has strong outreach capabilities
in all of the States, especially in those with the greatest
forest ecosystem laws. There is an office in almost every
county or parish, and they are very experienced in delivering
private land conservation programs.
Eligible lands for this program include designated forest
types that contain candidate threatened or endangered species
that can be recovered and can be recovered is a very key
component. They, also, include a safe harbor agreement, a type
of agreement that was pioneered by some of my good friends at
Environmental Defense that will help protect landowners once
the agreement has ended.
The program will be promoted to private landowners.
Contracts will be awarded to the highest-ranking applications,
and then an easement payment of up to 99 years will then be
paid based on the appraised value of that easement. The
restoration plan will then be developed and implemented. It may
include a variety of things, such as tree plantings, prescribed
burning, removal of fish barriers, placement of fish screens
and eradication of invasive species, to name a few.
For Fiscal Year 2005 and 2006, it was suggested that $25
million be incorporated in the President's budget for a pilot
project. The project would have focused on recovering the
gopher tortoise in the longleaf pine ecosystem and also focused
on salmonids in the Pacific Northwest, specifically the Umpqua
cutthroat. Many other conservation organizations were very
disappointed to learn that no funds were included in the
Healthy Forests Reserve Program in the President's budget in
either year.
For the record, I am providing a letter from 47
conservation organizations and 10 U.S. Senators demonstrating
the need for funding this very valuable program. I would like
to request that this Subcommittee support at least a pilot
program. You might consider one on private lands around
military bases to assist in recovering species that impair
training operations, while, also, reducing base encroachment.
This type of proactive approach that the Healthy Forest
Reserve Program offers, when funded, will help remove species
of our Nation from their respective lists. It will, also, aid a
species before it is listed, making it unnecessary to do so.
Working with private property owners and enabling them to
conserve habitat on their property is the kind of proactive
strategy that can head off a regulatory crisis, while improving
the environment and providing opportunities for economic
growth. It represents the best mechanism to increase landowner
participation, reduce conflicts and optimize the environmental
benefits of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act.
Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Udall, this concludes my
remarks. I will be glad to respond to any questions that either
you or other members may have.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cummins follows:]
Statement of James L. Cummins, Executive Director,
Mississippi Fish and Wildlife Foundation
``Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private
landowner who conserves the public interest.''
Aldo Leopold, Conservation Economics, 1934
Chairman Walden, Ranking Member Udall, Members of the Committee,
thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to speak on
the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA), specifically one of the
titles that concerns private lands. We worked hard to pass this
legislation. Many of you have spent a lot of time on it as well and a
lot of us in the conservation community appreciate it.
I am James L. Cummins, Executive Director of the Mississippi Fish
and Wildlife Foundation. I am a certified fisheries biologist, a
certified wildlife biologist and a private landowner. Our family's 140
acres has been in the family since 1833, during that time it has
undergone many changes from cotton to cattle/corn to timber/wildlife
today. Some of our more significant accomplishments include
conceptualization of the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program, helping
pass the Grassland Reserve Program and developing many of the
components of the Wetland Reserve Program. Regarding public lands, we
worked to develop the Holt Collier and Theodore Roosevelt National
Wildlife Refuges as well as the Sky Lake Wildlife Management Area,
which contains the largest stand of ancient cypress in the world.
Background
Healthy forests comprise more than just forest management and fire
prevention on public lands. According to the USDA Forest Service
(USFS), nationwide, public forestlands comprise 317 million acres
(42.38%) and private forestlands comprise 431 million acres (57.62%),
predominantly in the eastern United States. And although in many ways
these private lands are a model for achieving healthy forests through
active management for multiple uses, it is also important to recognize
the challenges to maintaining and improving the health of these
privately owned forests.
Private forests provide approximately 89% of the nation's timber
harvest. According to the latest data from the USDA Forest Service,
specifically the Southern Forest Resource Assessment, nationwide, the
South alone provides 60% of the nation's timber supply, making it the
largest producer of timber compared to any country in the world.
Furthermore, more board feet of timber are annually harvested from the
National Forests in Mississippi than all of the National Forests in the
Pacific Northwest combined. Although many factors affect these
seemingly lopsided statistics, the primary reason that private forests
produce so much timber is that they are being actively managed.
And while our nation depends so heavily on these private forests to
produce the thousands of wood products we need every day, we are also
depending on these same forests to provide many other services that
benefit society, for most of which landowners never receive
compensation. These free services to society include producing oxygen,
sequestering carbon dioxide, filtering air and water, providing fish
and wildlife habitat, including that for threatened and endangered
species, improving the aesthetic beauty of the natural landscape and
providing opportunities for recreation and solitude, just to name a
few.
We as a nation have come to expect all of this from private forest
landowners while rarely giving thought to how they can afford to
provide these services ``free of charge,'' when these services cost
landowners. It is a cost that can only be recovered through the selling
of timber, or by divesting of the land. In other words, we depend on
private forest landowners to invest in land and timber management
activities, often with a 50 to 100 year investment time frame, in hopes
that the eventual timber value will be sufficient to offset the cost of
owning and managing the land.
And while this may be possible for some private landowners, many
small and medium-sized landowners continue to find it difficult, if not
impossible, to invest in active and sustainable management of healthy
forests over such a long time. Add to this the uncertainty of
regulations that might limit land management options, as well as the
misinformed, but ever-increasing, campaign against the use of wood
products, and it is easy to see why more and more private forest
landowners are choosing to divest of their lands. These lands are
rapidly being developed and broken into smaller units that cannot
sustain many of the benefits and services society depends on from these
lands. It is for these reasons that the Healthy Forest Restoration Act
included Title V, the Healthy Forest Reserve Program, to address
various concerns on private forestlands.
While private forest lands are generally in better condition than
public lands, according the to Southern Forest Resource Assessment,
there are substantial opportunities to reach out to the Nation's
private, forest landowners with incentives that will assist them in
better protecting and managing these resources.
It is estimated that private lands provide habitat for 90% of our
Nation's endangered species. The South has the largest percentage of
listed species in the nation. For example, eight of the top ten states/
territories with the most listings are in the South; they include:
Alabama (115), Florida (111), Georgia (66), North Carolina (63),
Tennessee (96), Texas (91), Virginia (71) and Puerto Rico (75).
Mississippi has 38.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been effective in preventing
some species from becoming extinct; however, it can be significantly
improved by incorporating new recovery efforts. As long as the status
quo of not increasing habitat, therefore not increasing populations, is
maintained, the full recovery and delisting of populations of many
species will not happen.
Landowners need the encouragement, financial support and backing of
federal and state governments to undertake projects to restore rare
forests and the declining, threatened and endangered species they
support. Incentive-based programs provide the basic operating framework
to accomplish this objective. When funded, the Healthy Forests Reserve
Program (HFRP) will encourage the formation of constructive and
cooperative alliances with federal and state agencies to implement
fish, wildlife and forest conservation on private lands. It represents
the best mechanism to increase forest landowner participation, reduce
landowner conflicts and thereby optimize environmental benefits of the
HFRA.
There are many rare forest ecosystems in the United States that
exist largely on private lands that require active forest management
for their restoration and will require substantial financial incentives
for their ultimate restoration and conservation. Examples include the
once great longleaf pine forest of the southern coastal plain, fire-
maintained, natural southern pine forests, southwestern riparian
forests, Hawaiian dry forests, Southern Appalachian spruce-fir forests,
mature Eastern deciduous forests, California riparian forests, old-
growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, mature red and white pine
forests of the Great Lake states, fire-maintained ponderosa pine
forests and southern forested wetlands.
The states with the greatest risk of forest ecosystem loss are
Florida, California, Hawaii, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, South
Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Tennessee. This list almost mirrors
that of the states with the most listed species.
For example, across the southern coastal plain, the longleaf pine
ecosystem once covered some 74-92 million acres from southern Virginia
to central Florida and west to eastern Texas. Each of you should have a
copy of a handbook that we prepared in partnership with the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service. It will provide you a practical example of how
the HFRP should work. Longleaf pine currently covers less than 3
million acres, much of which is highly degraded. The longleaf pine
ecosystem is characterized by open-canopied stands and is one of the
most biologically diverse temperate forest ecosystems in North America.
Over 20 federally-listed species (candidate, threatened, endangered)
inhabit the longleaf pine ecosystem. The longleaf pine ecosystem also
makes significant contributions to biodiversity and carbon
sequestration. Moreover, longleaf pine produces superior solid wood
products, including saw timber, utility poles and other high value
products.
The restoration and enhancement of degraded forest ecosystems to
conditions as close to natural is emphasized through the creation of
the HFRP. The HFRP's philosophy is to work proactively with private
landowners for the mutual benefit of declining Federal trust species
and the interests of the landowners involved.
An Incentive-Based Approach
The Conservation (CRP) and Wetland (WRP) Reserve programs pay
property owners for implementing conservation practices. Many
conservation groups consider them the most broadly popular and
successful conservation programs ever passed by Congress. Waterfowl
populations and many other birds have increased due to these programs.
These programs are demonstrating that wildlife population declines are
reversible by habitat restoration. They have also stimulated rural
development through increased expenditures for wildlife-associated
recreation, which further stewardship and improve rural economies.
These types of habitat restoration approaches, and those that
include cost-share for conservation practices like the Wildlife Habitat
Incentives Program and the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program,
present an opportunity to solve many problems associated with the
recovery of threatened and endangered species in a manner that will
maintain a strong economy and respect private property rights. The
approach described herein will help make the Endangered Species Act
(ESA) more effective.
Habitat for threatened and endangered species, improving
biodiversity, slowing urban and military base encroachment and
sequestering carbon can all be accomplished by encouraging property
owners, through financial assistance, to develop and maintain
conservation programs that meet national and international standards.
The current Farm Bill does not provide enough incentives to allow for
significant population recovery. Problems exist with CRP due to its
limited enrollment period (10-15 years) and problems that could occur
after the contract expires. This is a key to meeting the Nation's
international commitments and better safeguarding the Nation's heritage
in fish and wildlife.
While there are now programs under the ESA that address rare
species before they are listed under the law, more needs to be done to
keep species off the list by acting early and proactively. The HFRP
should concentrate on improving forests, therefore a species' habitat,
before the species reaches a threatened or endangered status (i.e.,
rare, peripheral and special concern).
Administration and Implementation
I am pleased to see that the Natural Resources Conservation Service
(NRCS) will administer the HFRP. Since the NRCS currently has strong
outreach capabilities in all of the states with the greatest forest
ecosystem loss (an office in almost every county/parish) and are very
experienced in delivering private land conservation programs, they will
be very effective and efficient in delivering the HFRP. The USFS should
assist the NRCS in administering and implementing the program. Other
appropriate state and federal agencies and non-profit organizations may
be consulted with in carrying out the HFRP as the legislation allows.
The NRCS and the USFS, in coordination with the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's (NOAA) Fisheries Division, shall describe and define
forest ecosystems and the associated species targeted to recover. Both
the USFWS and the NOAA will be in a position to provide constructive
solutions to aiding in recovery efforts.
The NRCS and the USFS should promote the program to private
landowners. Other appropriate state and federal agencies and non-profit
organizations may also conduct outreach activities at their expense. As
authorized, NRCS may employ technical service providers as it does with
the conservation provisions of the 2002 Farm Bill.
Interested landowners should make application at a local NRCS or
USFS office. Ranking criteria for each state and forest ecosystem of
concern should be developed through a committee similar in function as
the State Technical Committee. All applications should be scored and
ranked. Contracts should be awarded to the highest-ranking applications
for each state.
The USFWS, USFS and NOAA should aid the NRCS in providing technical
assistance and developing restoration plans. A State fish and wildlife
agency, State forestry agency, State environmental quality agency or
any other State or non-profit conservation agency/organization could
assist in providing the technical assistance for the development and
implementation of a restoration plan or financial assistance to aid in
the cost-share. The restoration plan should maximize the environmental
benefits per dollar expended.
Landowners can voluntarily sell development rights to their
forestland. Eligible lands for this program includes designated forest
types that contain federally-listed threatened or endangered species or
a designated candidate species and that can be managed through a safe
harbor agreement, candidate conservation agreement with assurances or
similar, voluntary incentive-based programs. NRCS should conduct an
appraisal of these rights as it does with the Wetland and Grassland
Reserve programs.
To participate in the program, landowners should enter into forest
restoration agreements with the NRCS to carry out activities
appropriate to their property, forest types and restoration needs of
the species to be recovered. Agreement terms will be 10-years, 30-years
or 99-years in duration and should provide landowners with maintenance
payments for such activities as prescribed fire, natural regeneration,
planning, restoration and other activities. Landowners will receive
cost-share assistance for the activities.
For each forest type, the NRCS, USFS, USFWS and NOAA should develop
a series of stewardship activities that could qualify as eligible
forest restoration activities. Each forest type would have a unique
series of activities. For example, eligible activities for the longleaf
ecosystem might include planting longleaf pine on former longleaf
sites, use of prescribed fire, hardwood control, restoration of native
vegetation, control of invasive species, natural regeneration planning
or other activities.
Where landowners are undertaking stewardship activities that
directly benefit endangered and/or threatened species and where the
USFWS determines that such activities will result in a net conservation
benefit for the species, the USFWS will provide safe harbor assurances
through Section 10(a)(1)(A) or Section 7 of the ESA that ensure that
landowners will not be subject to additional regulation as a result of
their stewardship commitments.
Practices/Activities
The practices of the HFRP should include, but should not be limited
to: fencing for habitat protection; prescribed burning, restoration of
wildlife habitat and corridors; forest stand improvement to include
site preparation, tree planting, direct seeding, firebreaks, release
and site preparation for natural regeneration, installation of water
control structures in forested wetlands to provide beneficial habitat
for wetland wildlife; installation/construction of nesting structures;
restoration of hydrology; removal of barriers for aquatic species;
establishment, management, maintenance, enhancement and restoration of
grassed waterways and riparian areas; stream bank stabilization;
installation of in stream deflectors; placement of fish screens;
control or eradication of invasive exotic or competing animal and plant
species; restoration of rivers and streams; removal of fish barriers;
placement of fish screens; installation of low water weirs and in
stream deflectors; fencing for habitat protection; augmentation of
flows; best management practices and other activities approved by the
Secretaries.
Other Contributions
On February 15, 2002, the Administration announced the Climate
Change Initiative, which includes carbon sequestration. Carbon
sequestration is designed to meet the carbon-offset objectives of
companies by reducing greenhouse gases. The HFRP can positively impact
clean air and can be used to restore natural ecosystems through
biodiversity restoration and have other positive environmental impacts
such as reducing water pollution. There should be an emphasis on
reforestation and forest management efforts so that it is done in a
manner that both sequesters carbon and at the same time encourages
biodiversity. By doing so, the United States can achieve benefits in
other national and international commitments. To date, the U.S.
Department of Interior has been a leader in working with energy
companies to reforest lands of the USFWS in a biodiverse manner. The
Southeast and the Pacific Northwest are the two most effective areas in
North America for the sequestration of carbon.
With the strong concern by the public about forestry being
conducted in a sterile, monoculture fashion, the HFRP should have a
strong commitment to restoring and sustaining natural ecosystems that
are in a state of crisis. Of course, there should be flexibility to
customize projects to meet a geographic need. The HFRP can be conducted
in a manner that sustainable resource management is done in a manner
that is profitable and at the same time encourages biodiversity. By
doing so, the United States can achieve benefits in other national and
international commitments. The United States and Central American Heads
of Government signed the Central American-United States of America
Joint Accord (CONCAUSA) on December 10, 1994. The original agreement
covered cooperation under action plans in four major areas:
conservation of biodiversity, sound use of energy, environmental
legislation and sustainable economic development. On June 7, 2001, the
United States and its Central American partners signed an expanded and
renewed CONCAUSA, adding disaster relief and climate change as new
areas for cooperation. Biodiversity will promote such public benefits
as improved water quality, reduced soil erosion, fish and wildlife
habitat, restoring habitat for declining, threatened and endangered
species and outdoor recreation. These improved environmental assets
will be quantifiable and may be marketable, thus providing an
additional economic incentive to continue environmental enhancement and
further improve rural economies.
One of the most significant factors affecting our landscape is the
continued breakup of family-owned forestlands. Family-owned forestlands
are affected by changing economics and the increasing tax burden on
property owners. Passing on family forestland to the next generation is
a time-honored tradition. This occurs near both urban and suburban
areas and near military bases. As the demand for specialized training,
such as training that occurs in total darkness, the greater the need to
maintain buffers around bases. The HFRP can be utilized to limit
incompatible land use or to recovery species to preclude restrictions
for threatened and endangered species that might otherwise interfere
with military operations.
Budget/Appropriations
For Fiscal Year 2005, it was suggested that $25 million be
incorporated in the President's Budget for the Healthy Forest
Initiative for a pilot HFRP project. The pilot program would have
focused on recovering the gopher tortoise in the longleaf pine
ecosystem of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia ($18 million). Restoring
longleaf pine will accomplish this. There is a great opportunity to
recover this species in less than 10 years. The pilot program would
also emphasize recovery of one or more salmonids in the Pacific
Northwest through forest restoration ($7 million). The Umpqua cutthroat
and the Northern coast coho were two proposed target species (Oregon).
I and many other conservation organizations were very disappointed to
learn that no funds were included in the HFRP in the President's
Budget. To demonstrate support, I am providing a letter from 47
conservation organizations and 10 U.S. Senators demonstrating the need
for funding the HFRP. Please include those letters as part of the
record.
I request that this Subcommittee support at least a pilot program.
You might consider one around military bases to assist in recovering
species that impair military training operations while also reducing
encroachment onto lands adjacent to the base. The HFRP is not only very
much needed, but is does not duplicate other federal programs.
Summary
The type of proactive approach that the HFRP offers, when funded,
will help remove the threatened and endangered species of our nation
from their respective list. It will also aid a species before it
reaches a status of endangered or threatened, making it unnecessary to
list a species. Working with private property owners and enabling them
to conserve habitat on their property is the kind of proactive strategy
that can head off regulatory crises, while improving the environment
and providing opportunities for economic development.
As this full Committee considers modernizing and updating the
Endangered Species Act, I urge you work with your colleagues to fund
the HFRP and work with the House Agriculture Committee to utilize the
conservation provisions of the Farm Bill to assist in recovery.
Furthermore, any legislation should include a strong invasive species
control and threatened and endangered species recovery utilizing
incentives, including tax-based ones, for private landowners to
voluntarily participate. I think you will find that both industry and
conservation groups in my part of the world will help implement
conservation measures to avoid listings, recover species that are
listed and do this in a manner that we work with private landowners
versus against them.
Landowners in the South, and particularly Mississippi, have done a
very good job of conservation of habitat for all species, no matter
whether they are listed under the Act or not.
Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Udall, this concludes my remarks. I
will glad to respond to any questions that either of you or other
members of the Committee may have.
Thank you.
______
Mr. Walden. Thank you, and we will be following up with the
appropriate individuals to make sure that all titles of the
Healthy Forests Restoration Act are utilized appropriately,
recognizing our budget constraints on all titles, but there
should be more than nothing.
Mr. Cummins. Thank you.
Mr. Walden. We will work on that.
Ms. Tucker, thank you for being here. Why don't we go ahead
and take your testimony, and then I think we will have to cut
it off because we have about eight minutes before we have to be
over voting, and then we will come back. My apologies.
Please go ahead and start.
STATEMENT OF LENA TUCKER, OREGON SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS
STATE CHAIR ELECT AND DISTRICT FORESTER, OREGON DEPARTMENT OF
FORESTRY, SPRINGFIELD, OREGON
Ms. Tucker. Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee,
thank you for inviting me to testify on the progress of
Community Wildfire Protection Plan development implementation
in Oregon and the many opportunities and challenges for
professional foresters that this process presents.
For the record, my name is Lena Tucker. I am currently a
district forester in the South Cascade District of the Oregon
Department of Forestry. My district provides fire protection
and forestry technical assistance on approximately one million
acres of private and public forest land in the Cascade
foothills, in the Southern Willamette Valley. I am here today
as a professional forester, representing the Society of
American Foresters, the Nation's largest professional society
for foresters. The over 15,000 members of SAF around the
country are committed to sound stewardship of our forest
resources through sustainable forest management.
Community wildfire protection planning presents great
opportunities for professional foresters to help communities
become better prepared to address wildfire threats and, at the
same time, help educate communities and private landowners
about the need to address other forest management issues
through a landscape level planning approach. This is why last
year SAF joined with the National Association of State
Foresters, the National Association of Counties, the Western
Governors' Association and the Communities Committee to develop
and distribute a guidebook designed to help communities put
together these plans in compliance with the guidelines in the
Healthy Forests Restoration Act.
To date, over 6,000 copies of the handbook have been
distributed to Governors, State and local Government leaders,
professional foresters, interested citizens across the country
and in Canada. We estimate that Community Wildfire Protection
Plans have been developed for over 600 communities around the
country and, to date, you will note that I have just counted
about 64 Community Wildfire Protection Plans now in Oregon. So,
from your visit a year ago, Mr. Walden, we have really got on
the ball and got some things going there.
Mr. Walden. Congratulations.
Ms. Tucker. I am excited about that.
Working with CWPP's community fire planning under the
National Fire Plan for several years now, I have witnessed some
really extraordinary, unprecedented opportunities that the
process creates, just valuable opportunities for communities,
allowing them to identify their own local priorities for
community protection and resource management and economic
benefits.
My experience with the Oregon Department of Forestry and
National Fire Plan implementation has helped shape my
perspective on the usefulness of CWPPs. And while working in
the Eastern Oregon Area Office in Prineville, from 2001 to
2004, I was charged with developing an implementation plan for
our Department's use of Fire Plan grant funding. Foresters
utilize the National Fire Plan funding to start fuels reduction
projects and high-risk, wildland-urban interface areas in
Central Oregon, Southeast Oregon and Southwest Oregon. These
individual treatments around homes in high-risk areas were
linked together to provide community fuel breaks around
subdivisions.
In many areas, like Sumpter, Canyon City near John Day,
Crescent, Gilchrist, Sisters, just to name a few, Federal
agencies or Federal partners were able to complete fuels
treatments on the outskirts of the high-risk communities. Over
time, the strategic mitigation projects in the interface,
combined with landscape-level treatments on adjacent Federal
lands will help restore the declining forest health in areas of
Oregon.
I would like to show you a couple of slides.
The first one. This is near Bend, Oregon, the Fall River
estates. This community got on board with fuels treatment
probably about a year-and-a-half ago, a cluster of homes
surrounded by BLM and Forest Service lands.
Next slide.
This is treatment, again, kind of on the boundary line
outside of Fall River Estates. This is shown probably into the
Federal lands, where the Federal agencies were able to actually
do some fuels mitigation treatments.
Next slide.
Again, before fuels treatment on Federal lands. You can see
just the density of brush, ladder fuels, a lot of ladder fuels
in this lodge pole pine stand.
Mr. Walden. You know, I hate to do this to you, but we are
now under five minutes, and I was never a star athlete, by any
stretch of the imagination. So what I may do, and I apologize,
but it is the course of the voting around here, if you could
hold the rest of your testimony--because I would really like to
be able to see these slides, and I am kind of it right now--and
then we will resume and allow you to finish your comments, and
then we will go to Ms. Gregory so we can hear hers as well.
Now, here is the good news for you. You have time to get
lunch because we have two 15-minute votes, two 5-minute votes,
a 10-minute motion to recommit. So we are looking at probably
about an hour in legislative time. So that is what I would
anticipate is 50 minutes to an hour we will be back here to
startup and, again, I apologize for interrupting you.
Ms. Tucker. Not a problem. We can do that.
Mr. Walden. We have to do what we have to do. We are in
recess.
[Recess from 12:55 p.m. to 1:55 p.m.]
Mr. Walden. I am calling the Subcommittee back to order. We
timed that pretty close to what I thought it would be--wasn't
it five till? I apologize for the interruption. I hope you all
got refreshed while we were over voting.
Lena, why don't you return to where you were and talk about
the slides that you are showing us there, some of the work,
which I have seen, by the way, on the ground--not necessarily
specifically there, but I have been on a couple of those
forestry tours and pretty impressive the good work that is
being done to make that forest healthier.
So I am going to turn it back over to you. Go ahead an take
whatever time you need to finish up, and then we will go on to
Lisa.
Ms. Tucker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will just kind of
summarize these couple of slides here, and then I will go into
my summary, and we will be done.
Back to this particular area, which is in Fall River
Estates, south of Bend. This is kind of a before fuels
treatment project on the Deschutes National Forest there. It
would be adjacent to Fall River Estates. There is, also, BLM
land adjacent to Fall River Estates, and this is a case where
the community was doing fuels treatment within their community
and started working with the Federal agencies there to see if
the Federal agencies could do their fuels work right next to
the community. And planning, everything worked out right, and
they were able to do fuels treatment. This is a before. You can
see the debris and the ladder fuels.
The next slide will show the same photo point cleaned up.
Give us a little bit of time, and rain, and snowpack, and then
there will be herbs, and forbes, and wild flowers.
Mr. Walden. So that is the same location as the prior
slide?
Ms. Tucker. It is the exact, same location. You can just
see that the ladder fuels have been reduced. It is thinned out
a little bit. This is a lodgepole pine stand. Again, the ground
is looking a little bare, but given some time there will be no
native plants coming back into there.
The next slide.
This is probably one of my favorite projects. This did
happen before HFRA and Community Wildfire Plans, but it is a
great example of a community getting together and working on
creating defensible space around their homes. This is in
Sumpter, Oregon, between Baker City and John Day. And so this
shows a cabin there--you know, the big, old large pines. They
created defensible space around the cabin.
And the next slide, you will see a fence line. Now, to the
right of the fence line is that cabin and the private land and
to the left and out into the landscape is national forest. Here
is a case where the ranger district there was able to put their
fuels treatment money right adjacent to this community near
Sumpter and do thinning, mechanical treatment, and treatment,
hand piling.
And I believe the next picture is a prescribed fire that
they were able to do in there as well. So, again, great
collaboration on the part of the community and the Federal
partners there.
I believe that is all I have for pictures.
Just to sum this up, I would like to say that community
wildfire protection planning is very much a work in progress,
and it is going to take time and leadership from everybody who
is involved--Congress, all levels of Government, professional
foresters, as well as concerned stakeholders and citizens.
Maintaining a consistent level of funding and technical
assistance for hazardous fuels reduction projects through HFRA
or the National Fire Plan is integral to helping communities be
successful in carrying out their newly developed CWPPs. That is
really what we want. We want to help communities help
themselves.
A commitment must be made to allow communities and
stakeholders easy access to the information and resources they
need to develop their Community Wildfire Protection Plans. They
are not going to do it if we make it too difficult for them. We
need to keep it simple.
A concerted nationwide effort needs to be made to help make
these resources available to the low-capacity communities,
those communities who do not always have the resources or the
expertise available to start a collaborative planning effort,
and Sumpter could be one of those communities. I mean, they are
small. They are away from a lot of the services the bigger
towns receive.
Congress and the Administration also need to support
monitoring and evaluation efforts. How can we assess the
success of the process and enable the application of lessons
learned here? We could apply them to other areas of forest
management.
Building on the concepts in HFRA, we, as a Nation, need to
continuously seek opportunities to work across ownership
boundaries in partnership with all landowners, manage our
forests comprehensively and in a timely manner. I mean, the
fuels issue is real. It is here. It is now. It is today. We
need to deal with it in a timely manner.
Community Wildfire Protection Plans begin to create this
comprehensive strategic approach, and we urge similar
partnerships and collaborations for forest management and
restoration across the country. We are looking, again, at the
bottom-up approach--communities getting out there, defining
what is unique to their community, what is important, what
their values are.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today, and I would
be happy to answer any questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Tucker follows:]
Statement of Lena Tucker, Oregon Society of American Foresters State
Chair Elect and District Forester, Oregon Department of Forestry,
Representing the Society of American Foresters
Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee, Thank you for
inviting me to testify on the progress of Community Wildfire Protection
Plan (CWPP) development and implementation in Oregon and the
opportunities and challenges for professional foresters this process
presents. I am currently a District Forester in the South Cascade
District of the Oregon Department of Forestry. My district provides
fire protection and forestry technical assistance on approximately 1
million acres of private and public forest land in the Cascade
foothills, in the Southern Willamette Valley. I'm here today as a
professional forester representing the Society of American Foresters
(SAF), the nation's largest professional society for foresters in the
world. The over 15,000 members of SAF around the country and throughout
the world are committed to sound stewardship of our forest resources
through sustainable forest management.
Community Wildfire Protection planning presents great opportunities
for professional foresters to help communities become better prepared
to address wildfire threats and at the same time, help educate
communities and private landowners about the need to address other
forest management issues through a landscape planning approach. This is
why, last year, SAF joined with the National Association of State
Foresters (NASF), the National Association of Counties (NACO), the
Western Governors' Association (WGA), and the Communities Committee, to
develop and distribute a handbook designed to help communities put
together these plans in compliance with the guidelines in the Healthy
Forests Restoration Act.
To date, over 6,000 copies of the Handbook have been distributed to
governors, state and local government leaders, professional foresters,
and interested citizens across the country and in Canada. Numerous
workshops have been held to help community leaders put together these
plans, with foresters and other planning experts providing guidance to
help them through this process. We estimate that community wildfire
protection plans have been developed for over 600 communities around
the country. This represents a significant change in thinking about
wildfires that involves the communities and the people that live in and
around our forests and are most at risk from wildfires.
Benefits of CWPP Process
Working with CWPPs and community fire planning under the National
Fire Plan for several years now, I've witnessed the unprecedented
opportunities this process creates. Below are some general observations
of how CWPPs have improved the way we help communities reduce their
risk from wildfires:
CWPPs are offering many valuable opportunities to
communities, allowing them to identify local priorities for community
protection and resource management.
HFRA is complimentary to the development of CWPPs as
communities can use local priorities for fuels mitigation to shape
management decisions on public lands surrounding them.
ODF, federal partners, county partners, fire departments,
and extension foresters are encouraging CWPP development and helping to
facilitate local discussions about fire protection issues.
Communities are taking ownership in development of CWPPs
and utilizing federal and state agency technical assistance in fuels
mitigation strategy, structural risk mitigation, and landscape level
forest health treatments.
CWPPs ultimately belong to the community and reflect the
local discussions of a diverse range of interest groups. Collaboration
is a key component to the success of CWPP development.
Stakeholder surveys are a useful tool in assessing a
community's ideas on the issues and actions needed to improve overall
wildfire safety in the wildland-urban interface. This also actively
engages stakeholders in the process of CWPP development.
The Preparing a Community Wildfire Protection Plan
template developed by NASF, SAF, WGA, NACO, and the Communities
Committee is being used extensively by communities in Oregon as they
development local CWPPs.
The Preparing a Community Wildfire Protection Plan
template meets HFRA requirements, provides concise, step by step
instructions and provides opportunities for public involvement through
public meetings. This is a good template for communities to use if they
want to meet HFRA requirements and they are in a county that has
already done the FEMA wildfire chapter.
Most importantly, the CWPP process is allowing foresters
to do their job, applying the proven practices of silviculture to
ultimately achieve forest health and other forest management goals on
both public and private lands. The CWPP process is facilitating fuels
reduction and forest health treatments across the landscape and helping
to meet the goals of HFRA and the Healthy Forests Initiative.
CWPP Success stories from Oregon
To demonstrate the above observations, I'd like to share some
specific examples where CWPPs helped communities deal with often
controversial issues and in the end, helped better protect themselves
for fire risk and better manage their forested landscape.
My experience while working with the Oregon Department of Forestry
(ODF) on National Fire Plan implementation has helped shape my
perspective on the usefulness of CWPPs. While working in the Eastern
Oregon Area ODF office from 2001-2004, I was charged with developing an
implementation plan for the Department's use of National Fire Plan
grant funding. Foresters with the Oregon Department of Forestry
utilized NFP grant funding to start fuels reduction projects in high
risk wildland-urban interface areas in Central Oregon, South East
Oregon and South West Oregon. Individual treatments around homes in
high risk areas were linked together to provide community fuel breaks
around subdivisions. In many areas (Sumpter, Canyon City, Crescent,
Gilchrist, Sisters to name a few) federal agencies were able to
complete fuels treatments on the outskirts of high risk communities.
Over time, these strategic mitigation projects in the interface
combined with landscape level treatments on adjacent federal lands will
help restore declining forest health in areas of Oregon.
Today, foresters are assisting the public and communities with
preparing Community Wildfire Protection Plans to further increase the
effectiveness of creating defensible space around homes as well as
treating the larger forest landscape. The collaborative efforts of
foresters from the federal and state agencies, rural fire departments,
private landowners, local governmental agencies, volunteer
organizations, and concerned citizens who live in the wildland-urban
interface have resulted in the development of approximately 64 CWPPs
throughout Oregon.
From Southwest Oregon (Jackson and Josephine Counties): ``Fuels
treatment and fire prevention efforts are all around us. It is a great
time to get people involved. The big fires of 2002 and 2003 have
brought fire protection into our living rooms. As a result, little
groups are springing up everywhere and are receiving education and
assistance to help them understand what they can do to create
defensible space in their communities; they are providing a lot of
energy to the CWPP effort. In some cases we are seeing projects
accomplished even when grant money isn't available. People are now
spreading out, away from their homes, and modifying fuels beyond the
immediate defensible space area. Success is not just the development of
a document; it is the connections that those in the forestry/fire
professions are making with non traditional partners in their
communities.''
From Northeast Oregon: ``What we have gained from this experience
is something you can't capture in a written document. We have
enlightened the public about our roles (all agencies) in wildfire
protection and what they (the public) can do to help themselves. The
public understands what fuels reduction means and how collaborative
efforts with all the agencies can help to reduce the risk of fire in
the interface and at the same time increase the resiliency of the
forests in which they live. It is difficult to report the success of
community planning efforts B you can't measure the public's
appreciation of the efforts that foresters and fire experts have put
into helping them create defensible space around their homes and
working towards longer term forest health improvements.''
From the Crescent/Gilchrist area: ``Our CWPP steering group
received a wonderful compliment from the private sector in one of our
high risk, high priority areas. They were proud to be involved with a
group that is so well represented by ALL agencies and interests, even
industrial timber land owners. They couldn't believe that so many
people have come together to give so many volunteer hours for the cause
of Community Wildfire Protection.''
From Lane County in the Southern Willamette Valley: ``In Lane
County an extensive working structure has been established for
developing a county-wide CWPP. The plan development process involves
bringing together local, state and federal fire agencies as well as
public and private landowners to contribute to the plan content. Local
fuel reduction strategies and public outreach programs already in place
will be identified and documented as well as opportunities for
implementing new ones.
On a smaller scale, the Oregon Department of Forestry is working
with rural fire departments, foresters from Willamette National Forest,
and community officials to develop individual CWPPs for the Upper
McKenzie River area and the Oakridge/West Fir communities. These
smaller scale CWPPs will specifically target the wildland-urban
interface fuels treatment needs on private land as well as identifying
key fuels treatments on adjacent federal land. USFS officials are
working collaboratively with state foresters and stakeholders in the
communities to identify key issues, and concerns on wildfire risk that
exists on federal lands. The extent that the Willamette National Forest
can obtain funding for fuels management projects adjacent to these
communities, will ultimately demonstrate that the goals of HFRA and the
CWPP process are being met.''
Recommendations
Community Wildfire Protection Planning is still very much a work in
progress and will take time and leadership from all involved, including
Congress, all levels of government, professional foresters, and
concerned stakeholders to make it successful. Maintaining a consistent
level of funding and technical assistance for hazardous fuel reductions
projects through HFRA or the NFP is integral to helping communities be
successful in carrying out their newly developed CWPPs.
A commitment must be made to allow communities and stakeholders
easy access to the information and resources they need to develop
CWPPs. The Oregon Department of Forestry is taking the lead in
developing a website where CWPP templates, examples, grant
opportunities, risk assessment information, and technical assistance
contact information would be readily available for communities starting
the CWPP process. A concerted, nation-wide effort needs to be made to
make these resources available to low-capacity communities who don't
always have the resources or expertise available to start a
collaborative planning effort.
The Pacific Northwest Region National Fire Plan Strategy Team is a
partnership consisting of representatives from agencies or
organizations in Oregon and Washington that have a role in implementing
the National Fire Plan. This team of professionals has a key role in
providing technical assistance to help communities build capacity;
implement and provide oversight to the Healthy Forest Restoration Act;
work with state and county governments to ensure community interests
and needs are taken into account when funding NFP projects; and
promoting regional and local level collaboration. This Team will help
in getting the needed information and resources to communities in the
PNW region. A similar approach could be taken in other areas.
In addition to this, Congress and the Administration need to
support monitoring and evaluation efforts of the CWPP process to assess
the success of the process and enable application of lessons learned to
other areas of forest management.
While SAF is supportive of the increased emphasis through HFRA and
the Healthy Forests Initiative on forest health and wildfire risk
reduction, there is still a need for greater reforms within the federal
agencies to address the need for better, more comprehensive management
and restoration of our forests. Building on the concepts in HFRA, we,
as a nation, need to continuously seek opportunities to work across
ownership boundaries, in partnership with all landowners, to manage our
forests comprehensively. CWPPs begin to create this comprehensive
approach, and we urge similar partnerships and collaborations for
forest management and restoration across the country, not just in fire-
prone forests.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I'm happy to answer
any questions you might have.
______
Mr. Walden. Thank you very much. We will get to those in a
moment.
Lisa, thank you for being here. Sorry to delay your
testimony, but we are delighted that you were able to stick
around for it, and we look forward to it.
Thank you.
STATEMENT OF LISA DALE GREGORY, PH.D., NATURAL RESOURCE POLICY
FELLOW, ECOLOGY AND ECONOMICS RESEARCH DEPARTMENT, ON BEHALF OF
THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY, DENVER, COLORADO
Ms. Gregory. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity
to testify. I am Lisa Gregory. I am with the Wilderness Society
in our Four Corners Office in Denver, Colorado. I am here to
talk to you primarily about recent research done by the
Wilderness Society that highlights several significant
obstacles with the implementation of the National Fire Plan.
And since these problems are related to funding protocols and
the use of performance measures, they are also equally matters
of concern for the implementation of HFRA.
In my testimony, today, I would like to highlight three of
these areas of concern: hazardous fuels reduction,
collaboration, and agency accountability. The research is
primarily about the Forest Service.
In relation to hazardous fuels, my research project was
tracing Forest Service funding from the appropriations process
down to the Washington office, to Region 2, which is the Rocky
Mountain Region, down to two national forests along the front
range. And I, also, traced the money as it went to the Colorado
State Forest Service and from there to State and private
entities as needed.
There were several results that came out of this following
the money that are relevant and interesting. The first one that
I will talk about is the huge difference in the cost per acre
to treat fuels on two national forests that are adjacent to one
another, in very similar terrain, with very similar amounts of
wildland-urban interface. They were able to burn, as opposed to
mechanically thin, roughly, the same proportion, and yet on one
forest the cost per acre was more than double that of another
forest.
Explanations for this are varied, and it maybe suggests the
need to conduct a little bit more research into factors that
influence costs because it doesn't have to do necessarily only
with terrain or type of treatment. And that example shows that
there are other factors that might be worth exploring as we
seek to stretch our dollars to accomplish work.
Mr. Walden. Can I interrupt you? Did you say that each
forest burned rather than mechanical?
Ms. Gregory. Approximately, the same proportion.
Mr. Walden. I was trying to figure out if one did
mechanical and one did burning.
Ms. Gregory. They did, proportionately, about the same.
Mr. Walden. So it was similar sort of treatment methods.
Ms. Gregory. Yes, they were very similar.
Mr. Walden. Thank you.
Ms. Gregory. So the costs should have been very similar,
and they weren't. So there is something else at play there.
One forest was able, as a result, to accomplish nearly
three times the work with just about 60 percent more funding.
So maybe there is something that forest is doing right that we
could then copy and emulate in other forests.
The second result that I would like to discuss of following
the money, when I followed the State and private line items
through the Colorado State Forest Service, and we have heard
this today in the testimony from others, that there is,
undoubtedly, insufficient money that is being made available to
protect communities. Other research suggests that up to 85
percent of the land at risk is located on private land, and yet
the Fiscal Year 2006 budget that just came out allocates 3
percent of fire money to those lands. So there is a disconnect
there, and that again is worthy of attention.
A second component of the research that I would like to
highlight is collaboration, and this was raised by Mr. Udall
earlier. The Wilderness Society is very supportive of the
collaborative approach as a way to build consensus on fuels
reduction and other forest management. It is happening, but it
is happening very unevenly across the country. And the reasons
for such an uneven success with collaboration come down to
three things: there is little or no funding for the effort,
there are not very good performance measures used to encourage
managers to use a collaborative process, and the national
guidance is very weak, and there is a great deal of confusion
out there. In particular, many forest managers are confused
about the difference between interagency coordination and
community collaboration. And so the numbers that are being
reported are mixed and don't necessarily accurately reflect
genuine collaboration on the ground.
The third component of my testimony is the need for greater
accountability within the Forest Service. This has long been
reported, especially by the GAO, in terms of fiscal
accountability. My research confirmed that. Following the money
was a Herculean task within the Forest Service. And I, also,
found similar types of reporting and accountability problems in
the reporting of performance measures. For example, we see, and
we have heard all day today, number of acres treated, and that
is being used as a benchmark of success of the implementation
of HFRA. Many of these acres have been double- or even triple-
counted. So, for example, a single acre may be thinned one
year, then burned the next year, and then we come back the
third year and monitor and clean it up, and each year that acre
gets reported as treated, so that the total number of acres
treated doesn't adequately reflect the percentage of lands that
have actually been improved. And there are several other
examples in my written testimony that speak to the accounting
and reporting difficulties.
I see that I am nearly out of time, and that does
somewhat--
Mr. Walden. Go ahead and finish.
Ms. Gregory. That is OK. Those are my three major remarks,
the points that I wanted to make. We believe that the
implementation success of HFRA really depends on cleaning up
some of these protocols, reporting procedures and funding
misallocations.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Gregory follows:]
Statement of Lisa Dale Gregory, Ph.D., The Wilderness Society,
Denver, Colorado
INTRODUCTION
We appreciate this opportunity to testify on the implementation of
the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (P.L. 108-148). HFRA remains a
controversial law. However, this testimony will not address areas of
concern related to environmental procedures and safeguards. Instead,
The Wilderness Society welcomes this opportunity to discuss three
substantive areas of broad agreement: HFRA's attention to community
protection, its emphasis on collaborative processes, and the need for
improved performance measures and reporting procedures if these
objectives are to be achieved.
A forthcoming report from The Wilderness Society, entitled
Following the Money: The National Fire Plan, Performance Measures, and
Funding in the USDA Forest Service 1, offers empirical data
tracing appropriated money as it moves through the Forest Service
system and ultimately enables work on the ground. The report also
traces performance measures and explores the role of incentives
embodied there. Although HFRA is not formally considered part of the
National Fire Plan, certainly the legislation was designed within the
context of fire management and is intended to reduce risks to
communities. As such, the research behind our report is both relevant
and important for better understanding the challenges facing effective
implementation of HFRA. In particular, we would like to identify three
major problems in the implementation of HFRA and the National Fire
Plan:
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\1\ An executive summary of this report is enclosed. The final
report will be posted on The Wilderness Society's web page
(www.wilderness.org) by the end of March.
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Funding for hazardous fuels reduction is overshadowed by
the many problems associated with suppression spending. Additionally,
within the hazardous fuels program funding disproportionately favors
federal land, even though fire does not obey ownership boundaries. For
communities to be made truly safe, substantially more funding must be
devoted to the State & Private Forestry line within the Wildland Fire
budget.
Despite policy guidance to utilize a collaborative
process, neither funding nor the incentives created from performance
measurement support this practice. As a result, fire managers are ill-
equipped to establish the recommended long-term collaborative
relationships with stakeholders.
Reporting practices are deeply flawed in the Forest
Service. Our research shows that cost per acre estimates are very
difficult to predict with accuracy, publicized hazardous fuels
treatment numbers are exaggerated, and the degree of success reported
for collaboration is simply impossible. Public trust depends on
improved agency accountability.
BACKGROUND
Our analysis of Forest Service funding and performance measures
begins with the assumption that the allocation of federal money within
the agency reflects national and political priorities. In other words,
the distribution of scarce resources to carefully chosen public land
management programs is purposeful--not random--and based on strategy-
setting at a number of levels within the government. The use of
performance measures as a tool to enhance accountability and data
collection at the field level is designed as a way for money to be
directly tied to outputs; that is, through the use of this mechanism
the public should be able to track what it got for its tax money, the
executive managers should be empowered to redirect funds to places in
greatest need, and accountability ought to be improved at every level
of the agency. Perhaps most importantly, performance measures function
as powerful incentives for agency behavior. It is impossible to
understand the flow of money from the Washington Office downward
without also tracing accomplishments as they are reported upward.
Empirical data in the report, used for illustration in this
testimony, comes from Fiscal Year 2003 (FY03), since that is the most
recent year with complete and final data. In particular, data was
obtained from the Washington Office of the USFS, Rocky Mountain Region
2 and two National Forests in Colorado, the Arapaho-Roosevelt and the
Pike/San Isabel. The Colorado State Forest Service provided state-level
information. Other sources of data include federal budget documents,
reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), extensive
interviews of agency staff and outside experts, and a comprehensive
review of the literature.
IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES FOR HFRA
This testimony responds primarily to Title I of HFRA, the section
that seeks to expedite processes for vegetation treatments on and
adjacent to federal lands. Two critical implementation challenges stand
out: achieving the desired hazardous fuels reduction treatment acres,
and creating legitimate collaborative processes to expedite those
outputs. For each of those categories, I will discuss funding issues
and the role of performance measures.
I. Outputs: Acres Treated for Hazardous Fuels Reduction
A. Funding
As this committee is certainly aware, the biggest problem plaguing
effective funding of long-term wildland fire management goals is the
cycle of suppression appropriations, over-spending, borrowing, and
partial repayment. With suppression funding accounting for
approximately 70% of all Wildland Fire Program (Title IV of the Forest
Service's budget) dollars spent, many have identified it as a primary
source of concern. Current incentives do not encourage cost savings,
and fire managers on the ground have something of a ``blank check
mentality''. For example, in FY03, which was a relatively mild fire
year, the FS was appropriated a total of $351.9 million for
suppression, including Congressionally authorized emergency
appropriation funds. Still, suppression expenditures for that year were
$1,023 million, leaving a $671.1 million shortfall which was covered
only by transferring money out of other National Forest accounts. As
the GAO noted in a recent report, when money is transferred out of
other fire accounts, projects are frequently delayed or cancelled.
Since HFRA does not authorize suppression-immune accounts, the
suppression borrowing pattern is likely to interfere with HFRA-related
hazardous fuels reduction money reaching the ground.
Secondly, effective planning requires realistic cost estimates for
the work, but the current method for estimating costs is deeply flawed.
Most cost estimates are given in a cost per acre format, even though
costs in the southeast are vastly different from those in the west.
Estimates in the literature range from $31-$2500, making any average
essentially meaningless. Even two forests located along Colorado's
Front Range, the Arapaho-Roosevelt (ARNF) and the Pike/San Isabel
(PSI), show highly variable costs. In FY03, the ARNF was allocated
approximately $3.6 million for hazardous fuels reduction treatments;
they treated nearly 5,000 acres, 87% of them in the Wildland-Urban
Interface (WUI), and were able to use prescribed burning for 63% of the
work. By contrast, the PSI got $5.8 million (60% more than the ARNF),
treated 18,869 acres (280% more than the ARNF) with similar WUI and
prescribed burning percentages as the ARNF. The bottom line of these
wildly different outputs is that it cost the ARNF $736.74 per acre,
more than double the $311.14 it cost the PSI. As a result, the two
neighboring forests are able to accomplish a vastly different amount of
work with only slightly different pots of money.
Explanations for this disparity have been many and varied. Some
insiders have suggested that the use of discrete dollars was more
efficient in the PSI for administrative reasons, specifically the
hiring of more new field staff instead of planners. Others interpret
the results to be the inevitable result of the somewhat different
terrain within each forest's boundaries. This explanation is based both
on the PSI's perceived ability to treat larger areas at one time, and
its harvesting of greater value product to help offset costs. Whatever
the reason, these two forests are located in very similar forest types,
have extensive Wildland-Urban Interface areas, and are able to burn as
opposed to mechanically treat approximately the same proportion of
acres; the difference in cost/acre highlights the tremendous
variability in costs and accomplishments even within a limited
geographic area. More research must be devoted to understanding the
factors that influence costs, and thereby increase the agency's ability
to accomplish more work with limited funds.
Finally, effective implementation of HFRA will be hampered by the
limited funding devoted to the State & Private Forestry line. In 2001,
federal planners identified 11,376 ``communities at risk'' (66 FR 751-
777) as an indication of the extent of the land ownership problem
facing fire managers. Since fire doesn't recognize ownership
boundaries, private land must be integrated into landscape-scale
problem definition and fire management planning. State forest officials
therefore have a fundamental role to play in ensuring that public fire
managers work across ownership lines. The development of cooperative
management relationships to achieve these goals is of utmost
importance, and the passage of money from the federal level to the
state is a critical building block toward that end.
HFRA policy and implementation documents clearly state the critical
importance of working across administrative boundaries, but those words
simply cannot be matched by action unless funding backs intention.
Policy objectives are only as meaningful as the resources assigned to
support them. Federal reluctance to take responsibility for private
actions is in many ways understandable, as it is rooted in American
attitudes concerning private property; still, skyrocketing suppression
expenditures suggest that taxpayers already foot the bill for private
landowners who haven't taken the necessary steps to protect their
properties. Funding hazardous fuels reduction exclusively on federal
lands is incomplete and will ultimately undermine program success. The
President's FY06 budget actually decreases funding allocated to State &
Private Forestry, reducing it to a mere 3% of total money in the
Wildland Fire Program. The Forest Service estimates that 59 million
private acres in the ``community protection zone'' are at high risk,
but the agency is powerless to address fuel treatment needs there with
such limited funds. Increasing HFRA funding to state and private
entities will go a long way toward communicating commitment, reducing
fire risk and building capacity to bridge the public-private divide.
B. Performance Measures
To improve tracking of progress toward policy goals, the 1993
Government Performance Results Act (GPRA) requires federal agencies to
integrate performance measures into their strategic plans. In the case
of HFRA, the desired fire-related outcomes mirror those in policy
documents in the National Fire Plan: ``to reduce the risks of damage to
communities, municipal water supplies and federal lands from
catastrophic wildfire.'' But measuring risk reduction is complex and
long-term; indeed, most outcomes, like the ones quoted above, tend to
be programmatic and large-scale and, necessarily, difficult to assess.
Outputs, on the other hand, are incremental steps toward outcomes; for
example, if the outcome is reduced risk from fire, one output is
``number of acres treated for hazardous fuels reduction.'' The implicit
assumption, of course, is that the measurable output is an acceptable
indicator of progress toward an un-measurable outcome. But The
Wilderness Society's research suggests that, in fact, fire program
outputs and outcomes rarely line up well.
Linking annual outputs to long-term outcomes is exceedingly
challenging in any policy-making area. The many intervening variables
between agency inputs and long-term outcomes are commonly called the
``black box'' of policy making. That is, differentiating the impact of
one policy from other natural and planned phenomena that also have an
impact is often impossible. In the case of land management, there are
additional layers of complexity. For example, the desired outcomes
themselves are oftentimes invisible; identifying ``forest health'', for
example, has eluded scientific consensus in part because there are
simply too many variables at play. Furthermore, the time horizon for
ecological outcomes is oftentimes so long (decades, generations,
centuries) that annual outputs are rendered distant contributors. In
short, ecological realities lend unique problems to land management
agencies' attempts to implement GPRA.
The way the Forest Service currently measures hazardous fuels
treatments is flawed. The measurement and reporting of acres treated
has become something of a hallmark for demonstrating HFRA success to
audiences both within the agency and to the public. Forests report the
number of acres they treat, and track these acres both by method of
treatment (prescribed fire or mechanical means) and location (priority
Wildland-Urban Interface, or ``other''). This measure is intended to
demonstrate increased activity on public lands, more active management,
and a concerted effort to reduce the risk from fire. The assumption is
that reducing fuels will reduce fire risk, but this assumption is an
excellent example of the confusion between outputs and outcomes. Does
reducing fuels equal decreasing fire risk? An exhaustive search of the
scientific literature reveals a scant number of studies on the topic,
none of them conclusive. It is likely that reducing fuels is but one
factor that contributes to landscape-scale, long-term effective fire
management. Other program components, including fire use in appropriate
locations and enhanced cooperation by private landowners, are equally
critical for success. Still, the ``acres treated'' measure is widely
used and is considered the primary proxy for assessing success in the
highly funded (and highly publicized) hazardous fuels component of the
fire program.
One way that the inclusion of performance measures influences
activity on the ground is through incentives. Since so many key
functions of the Forest Service's work defy easy quantification,
managers operating under a system where their success is indicated by
performance targets are drawn to performing those tasks that produce
measurable outputs rather than those tasks that might be more important
yet less tangible. Any agency that depends on a limited number of
measures to define its ability to meet target goals will go to great
lengths to demonstrate success. For performance measures to guide fire
management effectively, they must be understood not merely as reporting
tools for work that has already been completed, but as incentives to
influence what work will get done in the first place. Likewise, policy-
makers should bear in mind that a manager who chooses to perform a
given activity, like fuels reduction, does so only by also choosing not
to perform other necessary work that is either less well funded or less
easily captured by performance measures. The opportunity costs of
incentive-driven behavior are real. Performance measures must be
constantly reviewed and adjusted to produce the best results.
Lastly, this heavy reliance on performance measures as indicators
of HFRA implementation success places a lot of pressure on managers to
report their work consistently and accurately so that it may be
included in national level totals and reported to the American public.
Research conducted by GAO, Forest Service employees, and The Wilderness
Society comes to identical conclusions: the agency is still struggling
to measure and report with necessary rigor. Prominent among the many
data collection problems is the protocol whereby forests report acres
as ``treated'' when they go under contract, not when the acres have
actually been burned or thinned according to prescription. Defenders of
this practice point out that it is the job of the USFS to develop
contracts and negotiate with private entities to get the work done, not
necessarily to do the work themselves. Once a parcel of land has
successfully gone under contract, the money is placed in an
``obligated'' category and considered effectively spent in that fiscal
year despite the many months or years that will likely transpire before
the actual work is complete and payment is made.
For example, in FY03 the Arapaho-Roosevelt reported having treated
4,957 acres. However, of those, 1,505 (30%) were merely contracted to
outside entities. Nearly 2/3 of the work was accomplished internally
and therefore verified as completed; the rest of the work was almost
certainly not done by the end of the fiscal year, but since the
contract administration for the job was, it was recorded as complete.
These practices may make sense administratively but are quite
misleading for the public. In Washington DC, acreage numbers are
consolidated and loudly reported as annual accomplishments; these
accomplishments are then used to tout success and justify continued
funding for the program. For example, to demonstrate the success of the
Healthy Forests Initiative in treating hazardous fuels, the Washington
Office announced that the agency had treated 335,000 acres in 2004, and
of those 126,300 were in the high-priority WUI. If the above 30% rate
is consistent throughout the agency, then in fact only 234,500 acres
were actually treated that year.
Other data collection habits are equally problematic. For example,
forests track acres treated by location, type of treatment, and more
recently have also begun to record fire regime and condition class
changes. In many cases, acres get counted twice or even three times. A
single WUI acre might be thinned one year, burned the next, and
contribute to a landscape-scale condition class change. Most readers of
the data would easily conclude that three times as much terrain had
actually been treated, since the treatment of that single acre would
appear in several columns over two different years. If the agency seeks
to improve public trust and strengthen accountability within its own
ranks, then reporting practices must be tightened.
II. Collaboration (Process)
Direction for the Forest Service's use of collaboration in the
implementation of HFRA comes specifically from the 10-year
Comprehensive Strategy Implementation Plan. Facilitated by the Western
Governors Association and created by a stakeholder group in 2000, the
Strategy was the first place to codify the term ``collaboration'' in a
formal policy document. In that piece, the authors include
collaboration not only in the title, but in the short list of ``core
principles.'' The framework for collaboration presented there stresses
the importance of communication ``across public and private lands,
administrative boundaries, geographic regions, and areas of interest''
and reminds readers that ``successful implementation will include
stakeholder groups with broad representation.''
The 2001 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, often considered
to be the backbone of the National Fire Plan, also weighs in on
collaboration. The Policy notes that ``uneven collaboration'' has
contributed to unsuccessful implementation of the 1995 Fire Policy.
Likewise, the Government Performance and Results Act, the law that
guides agency planners to integrate performance measurement into its
strategy, requires ``consultation'' with stakeholders. Similar guidance
on process is present in each of the policy documents associated with
the National Fire Plan. There is widespread consensus that an inclusive
collaborative process is integral to the implementation of HFRA and
essential for its success.
A. Funding
If collaboration is so prominently featured in policy documents,
one might expect there to be a line item in the budget to support the
enactment of this ideal. At the very least, the agency's commitment to
collaboration should be visible in investments in capacity-building.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. The USFS's National Partnership
Office has one employee, reflecting less than wholehearted financial
support for the development of better collaborative tools. This
Partnership Office Director reports that at the national level,
interagency cooperation is strong and thriving like never before. These
relationships, though, are more ``partnerships'', characterized by the
building of coalitions among entities with similar interests. Building
inter-agency relationships is absolutely critical, and these recent
cooperative efforts are worthy of accolades.
True collaboration, however, is the building of coalitions among
entities who often harbor different interests and objectives. At the
local level, there are some collaborative success stories. Forests in
many areas regularly foster long-term advisory panels consisting of
local citizens. HFRA asks communities to prepare ``Community Wildfire
Protection Plans,'' thereby bolstering opportunities to connect local
governments, fire planners, and interested citizens. Stewardship
Contracting also encourages this kind of group formation in its
``multi-party monitoring'' requirement, a provision that encourages the
formation of stakeholder groups to help determine where, when, and how
projects will be conducted. These developments, too, have the full
support of The Wilderness Society and represent significant progress in
the implementation of the collaborative ideal.
One missing link is regional level collaboration. The gap is
significant and represents a missed opportunity to engage regional
interest groups and citizens at the ecologically important landscape-
scale. A rare example of progress in this arena comes from an example
close to my home: Colorado's Front Range Fuels Treatment Partnership
was hailed last year by Montana governor Judy Martz as ``the best
example [in the state] of cross-jurisdictional collaboration, planning
and implementation on forest health.''
At all levels, agency planners are torn between investing limited
dollars on collaboration efforts or spending them on treating acres.
Citizens are burdened by the time and resources needed to maintain
community organizations dealing with fire. Perhaps most critically, the
preparation of Community Wildfire Protection Plans is outside the
capacity of many low-income communities; as a result, the land
management agencies implicitly prioritize the protection of more well-
to-do areas that are able to furnish their own funding to support this
type of planning. For collaboration to succeed, financial support must
back the policy ideals.
B. Performance Measures
The 10-Year Implementation Plan tried to provide land managers with
guidance by matching its stated goals with performance measures.
However, measuring collaboration is elusive and the Plan offers nothing
specific to guide participants. There is only one performance measure
which even comes close to assessing collaboration success: Goal 4, to
``promote community assistance'' seeks to improve community capacity
and suggests counting the ``% of communities at-risk that initiate
volunteer and community funded efforts.''
The current wildland fire management program offers scant
opportunities to assess managers' success at establishing lasting
collaborative processes. It may be argued that collaboration is not an
end in itself, and instead should be seen as a way to achieve more
substantive work which is then measured. But one of the unfortunate
results of this gap in performance measurement is a fire management
administration that is understandably reluctant to invest in such an
expensive and time consuming activity as collaboration. Performance
measures thus function as powerful incentives for decision-making, in
this case by omission. Agency personnel will respond to incentives by
directing limited resources toward places where efforts will be
recognized and away from places where investments are invisible.
Recently released performance data for the USFS presents some
confusing data on this issue. Under Goal #1 of its long-term Strategic
Plan, to ``reduce the risk from catastrophic wildfire'', the agency
lists the following performance measure: ``Number of acres of hazardous
fuels treated in the wildland-urban interface and percent identified as
high priority through collaboration consistent with the 10-Year
Comprehensive Strategy Implementation Plan.'' As discussed in this
testimony, the Implementation Plan directs planners to include all
manner of stakeholders, including community groups as well as state,
local and national government entities. In response to this measure,
the USFS reports that in 2002 (their baseline year) they had nothing
short of 100% success at meeting this collaboration target. Is the
agency truly claiming that every one of the 764,367 acres they treated
that year was identified as high-priority through collaboration? This
cannot be true. Copious evidence suggests that gaps in collaboration
implementation are widespread. To publish inaccurate data is to
compromise trust-building and hamper implementation success. After all,
if current collaborative efforts are achieving 100% of desired targets,
then there is no room for improvement.
In sum, the lack of funding for collaboration, lack of national-
level guidance, and lack of effective performance measures all
contribute to incomplete implementation of the collaboration ideal.
CONCLUSIONS
With funding for hazardous fuels reduction already unstable due to
overflowing suppression spending, it is perhaps not surprising that
there isn't money left to support the inclusion of private landowners
at risk and the development of better collaborative processes. But such
funding must be made available if HFRA's policy ideals are to be
implemented.
Funding streams are rightly matched with accountability structures
like performance measures. Indeed, incentives are nearly always
embedded in policy direction. Those who develop such incentives must
re-double their efforts to tighten the link between what is being
encouraged, the opportunity costs of those management actions, and the
overall policy goals. The first step is to identify which measures work
and then eliminate those that are either not being tracked successfully
or result in undesirable outputs. From there, policy makers can craft
new measures to better capture the wide variety of activities under the
fire management umbrella, carefully monitor how well they are working,
and continue to update them indefinitely. Too much tinkering will
result in measures that are not comparable across years, and to the
degree possible consistency should be sought. As measures are
tightened, agency planners must rigorously keep in mind the difference
between outputs and outcomes. The difference between the two speaks to
the need for more funding devoted to research that can help support
links between individual projects at the forest level and over-arching
land management objectives. Separating the two will also help agency
communicators better reach both internal and external audiences, and
thereby build trust with the public.
It is unlikely that any magic bullet will effectively remedy the
reporting difficulties that continue to plague the USFS's
implementation of performance measures. Performance measures simply do
not work if they are not accurately tracked and reported; improving
accountability is only feasible if results are consistently and
accurately communicated to a variety of audiences.
To improve the chances of HFRA implementation success, adjustments
need to be made not to the policy documents themselves, but to the
implementation guidance and many supporting protocols. So many factors
that contribute to our current wildland fire ``problem'' are largely
beyond federal control: drought in the west, climate change,
development in the Wildland-Urban Interface, and decisions made by
private landowners who live in risk-prone areas. Targeting process
(collaboration) and outputs (acres treated) are two things we can
influence. Reform of the supporting governance structures, including
funding streams and incentives created through performance measurement,
will go a long way toward realizing the potential of HFRA to protect
communities from the risks of wildfire.
______
Mr. Walden. Thank you. I want to commend you on your
testimony. Our staff has reviewed it in depth, and I have seen
it and intend to read it more carefully on the flight to Oregon
tonight, but it is very thorough and very helpful. You caught
some things that, frankly, we wish we would have caught. I have
to tell you, though, that I spent my freshman term on the Ag
Committee. We had the Forest Service before us. That was in
1999. The General Accounting Office came in and made a
presentation about the accounting system failures within the
Forest Service, and I will always remember they said, ``It is
so bad we couldn't finish the project,'' and that it is as if
Region 6 had a specialized piece of John Deere equipment, and
they loaned it to Region 2. Region 2 counted it once, and
Region 6 counted it twice.
I mean, it was one of those, just a mess. And I remember
saying, ``Is anybody held accountable?'' when the chief of the
Forest Service, then chief--I think it was Mike Dombeck was
there--``Anybody held accountable?''
``Well--''
``Anybody been reprimanded?''
``No.''
``Anybody been fired?''
``No.'' And I had just come off five years on a community
bank board where, you know, you are regulated, and I was on the
Audit Committee a while, and it just astounded me that our
books were in that bad of shape. They would take their
receivables against their--it was like their payments against
their receivables. It was like you took your checkbook and just
sort of ran an average of how far you thought you were off and
applied it to the whole thing. I mean, it was that--these are
statements out of the GAO.
Since then, though, these agencies have brought in some of
the best accounting minds on the planet, hopefully, and they
have made a lot of progress. What you have identified indicates
there is more to be done, but if you think what you found is
bad--
Ms. Gregory. I can confirm that some of the problems still
exist.
Mr. Walden.--you would still be looking for the first blank
check, if you had started five or six years ago on this. So we
appreciate the work you have done on it. You have raised some
very valid points--some I have raised about how are we counting
those acres treated? And I, also, recognize that part of a
treatment regime may require multiple processes over years.
Ms. Gregory. Absolutely.
Mr. Walden. But then we need to ID that and understand what
we are counting and what we are not.
Ms. Gregory. That is exactly right.
Mr. Walden. So I appreciate that and the collaborative
approach information is very helpful as well. I put together,
after this Act was passed, as Lena can tell you, three
community forums in each region in my district down in Medford,
in Central Oregon, and then up in Eastern Oregon, to bring
together, you know, the people who I thought would be,
initially, at least putting this together--the agencies, the
local Governments, and then had open public forums to tell them
let us get after this. It is a really important tool you have
been given to locally pull everybody in and try and write a
plan that works and give the agencies some guidance. You live
there, recreate there, let us try and get it right.
So, anyway, I appreciate your comments and, obviously,
those of our other two witnesses.
Mr. Cummins, as the House Resources Committee considers
modernizing and updating the Endangered Species Act, which is
somewhat off-topic, but not really, do you have any suggestions
for us? As you know, there are some broad-based interests now
in taking a look at how we can make it work better than it
works today. You mentioned I think the posters outside there.
I think you need to turn your microphone on, though, so
that the rest of the world can hear you.
Mr. Cummins. My accent is bad enough.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Cummins. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act has really
kind of set the table, especially with Title V. And in terms of
recommendations, you mentioned you were on the House
Agriculture committee, in your time serving on that committee,
there are a lot of different programs, Conservation Reserve,
Wetlands Reserve, Grasslands Reserve. Those programs can be
tweaked, and not a lot, to provide some pretty significant
benefits to T&E species. So I would encourage you to work with
your colleagues on House Ag.
I would, also, encourage you to look at one problem that is
not addressed that much are invasive species, and whether you
are in the West or the Southeast or New England, we have a
tremendous amount of problems looking at incentives and
especially through the tax code, utilizing tax credits, tax
credits that can be transferred from one landowner to another.
That way it doesn't penalize a small landowner. Those are
different types of things that I think will all certainly aid
in recovery and really help strengthen and update the
Endangered Species Act.
Mr. Walden. I appreciate that, and I appreciate your
reference to the invasive species. A number of us on this
committee, in working with Senator Craig, passed some
legislation. I was astounded to learn we are losing about 4,500
acres I think a day to invasive species, noxious weeds that are
taking over our rangelands, and clogging our little streams. I
mean, Purple Loosestrife is a beautiful little blooming plant
until you realize it has choked every stream in your
neighborhood and destroyed them. And so we have a lot of work
to do there.
Mr. Cummins. Cogan grass is a very damaging invasive
species that occurs in the Southern Coastal Plain, and it is
really damaging a lot of our forest lands, either Louisiana
Pacific, International Paper, et cetera. So we are seeing a lot
of that in the South.
Mr. Walden. As you know, the Healthy Forests Restoration
Act caps its provisions after we have treated 20 million acres.
There are estimates of up to 190 million acres of Federal
forest lands that need some sort of restorative work or subject
to catastrophic fire or disease or whatever. I would just be
curious, in the little time I have left here, what you all
think about that limit and whether, as we move forward, that is
something we should consider expanding.
Is there any scientific reason to keep a lid on it at 20
million acres, when most will tell you it is significantly more
than that?
Mr. Cummins?
Mr. Cummins. Well, if I have cancer, I want all of it gone,
and I think we need to work toward treating the acres that need
treating no matter what the cap is, and I don't think we should
restrict ourselves either based on a certain acreage limit. Let
us restrict ourselves based on the limit of the problem.
Mr. Walden. Ms. Tucker?
Ms. Tucker. I think it is hard to arbitrarily set a limit
on what you should treat. Really, we should look at priorities,
and what we are doing now is prioritizing those high-risk areas
next to the urban interface, and from there we work out into
areas that strategically make sense to treat for the fuels load
out there. It is kind of like how do you set the fuel break
around the community? Is it a quarter of a mile, is it a half a
mile?
Mr. Walden. Right.
Ms. Tucker. In the face of the Biscuit fire, where fire
managers out there saw it move nine miles in one day, you know,
a quarter of a mile might not cut it for a fuel break or as to
how far you go out there, so you just have to look at the fuel
loading, the terrain, the weather, what is happening in a
specific area and make a site-specific plan for it.
Mr. Walden. It sounds like that wouldn't even be a fire
pause let alone a fire break.
Ms. Gregory, what is your view on that?
Ms. Gregory. Before we go beyond 200 million acres, I think
we--
Mr. Walden. It is 20 million.
Ms. Gregory. Sorry--20 million.
Mr. Walden. If you would like to limit it at 200, we might
cut a deal right here and now.
Ms. Gregory. Before the limits of the act, as it exists, I
think we need to focus more of the money into the wildland-
urban interface by getting that money to communities as they
need protection. We are so far from meeting those goals, the
existing goals, that I think it is a difficult proposition to
consider a real one.
Mr. Walden. But would the fact that a true collaborative
approach takes time--
Ms. Gregory. Yes.
Mr. Walden. I mean, I would hate to bump up against it. We
are going to wait for money no matter what, I think, in this
process. There is never enough no matter what program you are
talking about. Certainly, this is expensive, but saves us long
term. I guess that is why I am starting to think forward
saying, you know, it wouldn't take us that long to figure out
20 million acres, four or five years, maybe, and collaborative
approaches and appeals can take that.
Ms. Gregory. Well, as Ms. Tucker suggested, 600 communities
she said have completed their Community Wildfire Protection
Plans out of an estimated 11,000 communities at risk. So the
need there is tremendous, and the Federal support in the form
of funding isn't there, and it is certainly slowing some
communities down. So I would recommend that the money go toward
those needs first.
Mr. Walden. So not lift the cap yet.
Ms. Gregory. Not yet, no.
Mr. Walden. All right. I have exceeded my time.
My generous colleague, Mr. Udall?
Mr. Tom Udall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I very much
appreciate having the panel here today.
Ms. Gregory, you talked a bit about collaboration, and we
all, I think from the West, understand the importance of it.
And I think you mentioned that there were problems as far as
policy guidance. Could you flesh that out a little bit more and
how you think we could improve in that area?
Ms. Gregory. Yes, I could. Thank you for the question.
There is a great deal of confusion, as I mentioned, between
interagency coordination and true community collaboration, as
described in the 10-year Comprehensive Strategy Implementation
Plan, which is what is referenced in HFRA as the guiding
definition of collaboration.
I am very perplexed by a statistic that I read in the
Forest Service Strategic Plan and I heard repeated here today
by Mr. Rey that he suggested that 97 percent, the strategic
plan actually says 100 percent of acres that were treated were
done so--were identified as a priority under a collaborative
process. That seems, to me, to be simply impossible that we
have 100-percent collaboration success at this point. If we
did, it would seem there is no room for improvement, and I
think everybody agrees that there is, in fact, a great deal of
room to better institute a collaborative process at all levels,
particularly the local and regional levels of organization. To
do that, we need to back our calls for that with both funding
and guidance.
So, for example, the National Partnership Office here in
Washington has one full-time employee. From what I understand,
there are maybe two regional offices with half-time employees
devoted to better understanding and implementing collaborative
process. We can certainly do better than that, and there are
communities trying to develop protection plans. There are
regional level bodies that could certainly use the support and
guidance of somebody with some expertise in what collaboration
is and how to do it well.
Mr. Tom Udall. So one of your recommendations would be to
increase the number of personnel that actually work on forest
collaboration.
Ms. Gregory. That would be great.
Mr. Tom Udall. Because you are talking about very small
numbers right now.
Ms. Gregory. If we had one person in every regional office,
we would be looking at, what, nine people? And that would give
a point person in every region for groups that needed some
assistance or support. That would be a big step.
Mr. Tom Udall. In your opinion, does the Fiscal Year 2006
budget reflect progress in the areas that you recommend, such
as State and private forestry?
Ms. Gregory. No. As a matter of fact, the funding for State
and private forestry has moved in the opposite direction. For
the last five years, the average State and private forestry has
represented about 7.5 percent of money allocated to wildland
fire management. In the 2006 budget, it is down to 3 percent.
So we are actually giving less money to communities where the
need is greatest. And I think, as you said in your opening
remarks, the money should follow the threat.
Mr. Tom Udall. Could you just outline for us a little bit
the size and the magnitude of the threat that there is on State
and private land compared to, say, on Federal land?
Ms. Gregory. I think the numbers are a little bit uneven,
depending on the source, but absolutely everybody agrees. The
Forest Service's own data suggests that maybe 40 percent of
land at risk are on private land. Research done by The
Wilderness Society suggests it is much higher than that. In any
case, it is disproportionately underfunded compared to the
amount of money going toward treating hazardous fuels on
Federal lands.
I strongly believe that unless we better empower
communities to be partners in that effort, we won't solve the
fire challenge that is facing us, and we won't effectively
reduce risks to communities.
Mr. Tom Udall. Great.
Mr. Chairman, thank you, and I think this has been a very
productive hearing today, and I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Mr. Walden. Thank you. I appreciate your participation in
it--
Mr. Tom Udall. I thank the witnesses on the third panel.
Mr. Walden.--and that of our witnesses as well, all of our
witnesses. Obviously, the record will stay open in case any of
the other Members who couldn't come back or stay with us all
day have questions, and we appreciate your responses to those.
We appreciate the research you all have done and your counsel
and guidance in this.
I, also, want to recognize Richard Cook, who is with us
today. He is a Fellow from the U.S. Forest Service helping out
the Committee. This is his first hearing, so we appreciate his
help.
And it was, also, Megan's first hearing, I am told, for the
Minority, and we appreciate the great job she did.
So thanks for being here. We appreciate all of the input.
We have a lot of work to do, and we will, in this Committee, I
intend to run a fairly aggressive operation to deal with these
problems. That is our job and our responsibility, and I think
together we can continue to find good solutions that will work
for our forests and our future.
With that, the Subcommittee is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 2:20 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]