JUDITH KOHLER Associated Press writer | Posted: Wednesday, September 6, 2006 12:00 am
DENVER - After getting a look at insect-infested forests in the Rockies, Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth and other federal officials unveiled a plan Tuesday to make it easier for all levels of government to more quickly attack the bark-beetle epidemic in the West.
The plan, which the Bush administration plans to send to Congress this week, would change the way the federal government approves and administers contracts so that logging and other work to fight wildfire threats and tree-killing bugs can be carried out more easily across various government jurisdictions.
"If we don't find a way to work better together on these boundaries, we're all going to pay the price in the long run," Bosworth said in a news conference in a state building across the street from the Colorado Capitol.
Bosworth referred to a flight he, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey and Interior Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett took earlier in the day over central and northern Colorado. He said wide swaths of beetle-infested forests stand out as splotches of brown and rust-colored dying trees.
Millions of acres of trees from Canada to Mexico have been attacked by the insects that burrow under the bark. A fear is that the dead timber is ready tinder for wildfires, an increasing threat as more people move into the forests.
Rey announced that the regional Forest Service office in Denver will receive another $1 million to battle the bark beetles.
The Colorado congressional delegation has sought more money to stem the insects' spread and proposed bills to speed up some of the work.
One of the challenges, officials said, is the checkerboard of land ownership in the West. The proposed Healthy Forests Partnership Act would allow the federal government to cooperate more easily with state, local and tribal governments and private landowners.
"Nature itself knows no jurisdictional boundaries. We need tools that enable us to work across those boundaries," Scarlett said.
Rey and others characterized the proposal as the next step beyond the 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act. That law is aimed at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires by speeding approval of projects to remove small and diseased trees and overgrowth in forests and limiting appeals and environmental reviews.
The new proposal's goal is to cut through bureaucracy, streamline the process and provide incentives to businesses by offering no-bid contracts and creating rural enterprise zones, which typically include tax breaks to promote investment. The plan also calls for designating areas with overlapping boundaries that are at high risk for wildfires.
Rey said the hope is that businesses or local governments will build facilities that could burn timber to generate electricity or convert it to other uses, making the work more profitable.
"It would increase the speed and amount of work that can be done in an environmentally sensitive fashion," Rey said.
He added that environmental regulations wouldn't change.
Bosworth said the legislation would also allow federal agencies to expand efforts under way in Colorado and Utah, where managers have expanded federal projects onto state land.
"This allows for the expansion, essentially, of the good neighbor policy which has really served us well in Colorado," Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo., said.
Beauprez said he hopes the legislation will be introduced and passed quickly.
Colorado business and governmental leaders dealing with the beetle infestation welcomed news of the initiative. Counties and communities have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars cutting and treating trees and could use more help from the federal government and private investors, said Gary Severson, executive director of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments.
Severson said local governments get frustrated because of the time federal contracts can take.
"The thing that most people are scared of is the wildfires that may come," Severson said.