James Risch Discusses Idaho Roadless Rule And Fire Prevention Methods

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During a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. James Risch (R-ID) asked Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz about Idaho Roadless Areas and fire prevention.

Transcript

00:00Thank you. Senator Risch. Oh, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to my friend from Washington.

00:05I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that horrible situation we had with the firefighters being killed.

00:12Firefighting is a really dangerous job to begin with.

00:14Then when you add to it this kind of thing, it's awful.

00:18I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you to Washington,

00:21which responded with literally hundreds of law enforcement people to address this situation.

00:29We're very thankful for that.

00:31Our heart goes out to the people up there.

00:34Tom, proud of you. You're the first Idahoan to be chief since Dale Bosworth was when I was governor of Idaho.

00:42Dale and I had graduated in the same class from the University of Idaho College of Forestry.

00:49That was a little before your time, probably, but Dale did a great job and helped me.

00:54And my colleague got ahead of me on the road list.

00:59She knew I would be bringing it up, and that was really an effort between us in Idaho.

01:07And how this worked is George W. Bush invited the states to look at the road list areas

01:13and come up with a plan for their state.

01:15We were, I guess Colorado did some, but we were primarily, we've got the road list rule.

01:23I'm very proud of it.

01:25The other states did not do what we want to do.

01:29And frankly, I had a lot of people advise me that I shouldn't get into that because it was controversial.

01:34As you know, nobody knows how many road list lawsuits there's been.

01:37There's been hundreds, maybe into the thousands.

01:40And every time the Republicans are in the Democrats' file suit, and every time the Democrats are in the Republicans' file suit,

01:47and nothing ever gets done.

01:49The good news, and I think the proof is in the pudding on my road list rule,

01:53is that since that's been in for the last two decades, we haven't had one lawsuit involving road list in Idaho.

02:01There have been a lot of road list lawsuits, but every time they're filed, they exclude Idaho from the suit.

02:06So, I mean, I think that's, the lawsuits, it's a great deal for the lawyers,

02:11but it really wastes a lot of time and energy and everything else.

02:16The way we went, the way I went about it was, when the federal government suggested that we in the states have a look at it,

02:23they gave us no parameters of any kind.

02:26And the way I went about it was, I said, well, we're going to put together a committee that has,

02:30that everybody's represented at.

02:32It's the loggers, it's the, so industry's represented.

02:37It was the recreational users, which is not one bucket, as you know.

02:42The motorized recreational users are very different from the wilderness-type recreational users.

02:49We brought all those people to the table and really took the millions of acres that we had in Idaho

02:56and broke them into various, into various, we had five different categories.

03:02Because, as you know, the road list is, as you say, there's road lists that have roads in them.

03:06And they're all over the board.

03:08And they were the ones left over when they put all the wilderness groups,

03:13all the wilderness lands into wilderness area.

03:17There were ones they couldn't reach an agreement on,

03:18and they set them aside saying these should be looked at.

03:20Well, nobody ever looked at them.

03:22But in any event, my pitch to you is that we are in the process of and have been for a little while,

03:29because it has been so successful, looking at it, putting it in statute as opposed to just by rule.

03:38Because, over the last two decades, the Forest Service, not you, but the Forest Service,

03:45people in the Forest Service have taken a run at dismantling the Idaho road list rule.

03:50The road list properties, as you know, are managed by a committee that is appointed by the governor.

03:57So it's federal land, but we have very strict parameters on these five different themes that are there.

04:05And then this group manages it.

04:08And within there, we have a number of small towns.

04:12As you suggested, Senator Cantwell, interface is a real problem when you're coming to fire.

04:19So what the road list committee in Idaho has done, they have focused on these areas

04:24and have done treatment plans around these towns so they can stop a fire as it goes through there.

04:31Because, as you know, one of these things get going at about 10 o'clock in the morning when the wind comes up.

04:36What you need is a pair of tennis shoes, because you've got to stay away from the fire and not attack the fire.

04:40You can't control it.

04:42So, on the other hand, if you have treated property, that is, ones that have had sensible harvest on them,

04:50it's really a good thing.

04:52So we're going to look at trying to get this statutory in, because the Forest Service,

04:58within the Forest Service, there are some who really hate the fact that the state has a say in managing these grounds.

05:07Not for those of us that have a lot of federal lands.

05:11This is not uncommon for us.

05:13But, look, we can deal with this, and it's been a tremendous success.

05:16So I'm going to enlist your help in that, Tom, to see if we can get that done.

05:21And I've always hoped that other states would take a hold of this.

05:25It was a collaborative effort.

05:28The minute it was done, we had one of the environmental groups file suit,

05:34which I had tried to get to the table.

05:36We tried to get everybody to the table, and they filed suit immediately.

05:40But, plus the environmental group, we said, look, we were going to do this together.

05:44We stuck together all the way through the litigation, which went on into the Obama administration.

05:49And to their credit, they let us, in Idaho, direct that lawsuit.

05:56Our roadless rule was approved by the district judge, an environmental-leaning district judge in Boise.

06:02But more importantly, it was approved by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

06:08And then certiorari was turned down by the Supreme Court.

06:10So we got it.

06:12We got our rule.

06:12We got it in law.

06:13But we'd like to see it statutorily.

06:15So we've been working at it for some time.

06:18Going to continue to do it.

06:19Been a tremendous success.

06:20I highly recommend it for any state that doesn't have it.

06:24You can avoid all those lawsuits and actually do stuff with the ground that's in keeping with the various themes that we propose.

06:34I've talked long enough.

06:35Mr. Chairman, thank you for the floor.

06:36Thank you, Senator Cantwell.

06:38And those of you from states that have large federal holdings, I strongly recommend the approach that we did in Idaho.

06:45Tom, thank you for your service.

06:46Thanks for doing this.

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