Red Lodge Clearinghouse

The 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act was designed to better allow foresters to conduct hazardous fuels reduction projects and other preventative actions to lower the frequency and severity of wildfires. Used on 213,000 acres nationwide thus far, the bill permits expedited environmental assessments for proposed treatments, which environmentalists claim have made it easier for timber companies to get to forest lands that must normally undergo a more arduous analysis.

The current interpretation of the law limits treatments to within the 1.5-mile-wide, doughnut-shaped wildland-urban interface (WUI) that surround communities in forested areas, where only a fraction of wildfires start. In the Northwest last year, of the 1,468 fires started on Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service lands only 17 started within or adjacent to WUI lands, according to Walden's office.

"I've heard from enough frustrated foresters at this point to know that Congress needs to act to give them the tools to reduce the threat of wildfire on federal lands in our most at-risk areas, just as HFRA initially intended," Walden said Friday.

Walden's bill, expected in the coming weeks, would grant the authority to do hazardous fuels treatments beyond the WUI but within community wildfire protection plan areas, which the law gives local communities the authority to establish.

Michael Francis, director of the national forest program at the Wilderness Society, said there is no science supporting the need for expanding fuels reductions beyond the WUI to protect a community.

He theorized that the legislation has less to do with science and more with extending Healthy Forest's streamlined environmental protections. "This idea to extend these truncated procedures sound likes the timber industry wanted to extend its reach beyond that 1.5 miles," Francis said.

Walden is among several lawmakers that have criticized Healthy Forest's shortfalls in recent months.

During a Senate Forest Subcommittee hearing late last year, Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said the law had failed to live up to its promise to reduce wildfires on federal lands. Wyden cited a lack of money as the culprit behind the failure. While the bill authorizes $760 million annually for hazardous fuels reduction, the Bush administration and Congress have allocated less than $300 million each year.

Under the president's fiscal 2009 budget proposal for the Forest Service, fuels reduction would get $297 million, down from $310 million in fiscal 2008.

Meanwhile, Republicans have assailed the courts for limiting the effectiveness of the law. Last year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the Forest Service categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act for fuel reduction projects up to 1,000 acres and prescribed burns up to 4,500 acres (E&E Daily, Dec. 14, 2007).

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