During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing before the congressional recess, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) questioned witnesses about forest management strategies.
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00:00Colorado. Ms. Bulbert is recognized for her five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses for being here today. I would echo Ms. Hageman's statements. We have been unable to properly manage our forests for decades now, and it has really prevented us from being proactive when it comes to wildfires.
00:20I live in Colorado. We are part of the beetle kill epidemic that is taking place. We have six billion standing dead trees in the West, all creating a massive tinderbox. When we have a catastrophic wildfire, it will emit more carbon emissions, according to NASA, in a single day than an entire state having all of their vehicles running 24-7.
00:43And so this is a real problem, and we have to be proactive in managing our forests, and that really stems to everything. It is the core of everything. When we have unhealthy forests and we have unhealthy watersheds, about 80% of Colorado's municipal water comes from our forests, and to protect that, we must protect our forests.
01:06In Colorado, we have really been prey to wilderness areas, these designations that prevent us from managing the roadless rule that contributes to things like the route forest fire and many others. I've been in the air seeing these fires, and you can have all the money in the world, but if you aren't going to actually manage, or if you're prohibited from managing the forest,
01:34then we are going to continue to have these catastrophic wildfires. Chief Muncy, with all of the policy that is out there that prevents forest management, which policies would you like to see maybe deregulated in order to properly get to a goal of minimizing catastrophic wildfires before they happen?
01:58Chief Muncy, I'd like to see the Fixer Forest Act passed and become national policy, because I think that the CE is allowing us to treat greater areas of critical importance.
02:10I'm going to divert just a little bit from your question, and go back to the previous comments on the millions of dollars that could be taken away from local government.
02:17We recently did a study about where's the money going, because the local, to be honest, I demonstrated in our picture how we solved the bark beetle problem, a million trees, 1.1 million trees we were able to pull away.
02:30That money doesn't come to us. It's going to other groups that have no accountability. We're not focusing on the outcomes of where the dollars are going.
02:37We're focusing simply on what people are saying and the outputs. That money needs to be brought back into local communities to do actual work. There needs to be technology and dashboards that prove to our citizens that what we're doing is focusing on outcomes so that we can get this work done.
02:54So everything you say, I agree with. The process of what we need to do is to have better leadership that's more than just focusing, and I love President Trump's proposal to bring the wildfire agencies together.
03:11That's a bold move, because there is overlap in what we're doing, but the biggest thing is that we don't have a key decision-making, and we will talk about the national forests.
03:19On one end, I have the Angeles National Forest in our jurisdiction. The second end, I have San Bernardino National Forest. There's two different forest supervisors, and the same federal policies are interpreted so differently.
03:30Leadership is critical, and I think that we need to use technology and artificial intelligence, not only for the permitting process, but to fairly apply the federal policies to allow us to do our job so that we can get into our forests, get into our communities,
03:47to do meaningful work so that our homeowners can inform, can have insurance for their houses, so they can have this expectation that a fire that's originating in the natural resources isn't going to burn into our communities. Thank you.
04:02Yes, and I know President Trump has been focused on cleaning up the forestry, the forest floors, and getting those fuels off the ground.
04:09And would you agree that those in the timber industry, when they are allowed to go in and harvest timber from our forests, they create roads to get in there?
04:20Does that benefit your fire mitigation efforts?
04:23I've served on federal incident management teams for well over a decade, and so I've fought fires in forests that allowed the timber industry.
04:32And I will tell you unequivocally that the infrastructure that's in place allows us to access these fires.
04:37More importantly, a lot of the areas that have had timber harvesting are great places to stop the fire.
04:44It's a good place to introduce good fire. It's been extremely helpful having that infrastructure in place.
04:51I'm not a forester like Mr. Westerman, but I also understand.
04:56What if I saw?
04:57But I also understand that, and I watched a recent CNN interview that he did, that he's an outstanding football player,
05:03and he can weigh in on Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift and the Chiefs. Nice job, sir.
05:10Thank you, Chief. My time has expired. I yield.
05:13I thank the gentleman, the gentleman from the front committee, Mr. Westerman.