Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend and colleague for yielding that time. Well, another day, another giveaway. Pretty ironic: here we are, we're about to get into a massive fight over whether or not we should increase the debt limit of the United States or default on our obligations, which involves many trillions of dollars, and today we're going to give away a taxpayer asset that is worth billions of dollars. We're going to give it away. Oh, we're going to get some pretty land in exchange. That's valuable. That's nice. But, you know, for many billions of dollars, we could probably buy a lot more land if we wanted it, or we could have a little debt reduction. I had a simple amendment. My amendment would have said that we would charge an 8 percent royalty. Eight percent of the value of the copper coming from these publicly-owned lands would be paid to the Treasury of the United States of America. And guess what? The Republicans didn't allow the amendment. What are they afraid of? They're afraid that maybe some of their Tea Party types over there might vote for it? You want to run government like a business, don't give away assets. That's what we're doing here. You would still get the jobs. Now, you know, this bill contains sort of a bizarre--they're saying, oh, we're going to get some money maybe, sort of, kind of. Except Treasury--nobody can interpret the language of this bill. It's a rather unique and very speculative--potential, future, possible--payment scheme, which would be controlled entirely by the company using proprietary information. Of course they're going to volunteer to pay money. Yeah, I don't think so. It's not going to happen. So we're going to trade away a multibillion-dollar asset for a few thousand acres of recreation land. I would say on any other day I wouldn't hear from the Republican side of the aisle that that was a good idea--give away billions of dollars of Federal assets for some recreation lands. Now, this isn't about the surface. It's just about the fact that Rio Tinto, a foreign corporation, is not going to pay anything, or very little, for the value of the minerals that are extracted from this land. In fact, I understand that they've pretty much stopped any other exploration around the world because this is the richest copper load in North America, one of the richest in the world. They don't want to go to these other piddly places where they've been--Indonesia, Australia and all that. They're just focusing all their energy for copper right here. And guess where the copper is going to go after it's mined and after they don't pay anything to us for taking it out of the ground? It's going to go to China. Foreign corporation, ship it to China. Yeah, we'll get some jobs. And if they paid a royalty, we would still get the jobs and we would make the taxpayers whole. Now, the oil and gas industry pays 12.5 percent royalty to the government for the value of the resources they extract. Why shouldn't the mining industry pay? Well, they don't pay because we're operating under an 1872 law signed by Ulysses S. Grant. That's what governs mining here. Now, come on. It's time to update that law. And if they don't want to update the law, they could at least begin to charge some royalties for the extraction of these minerals. We have given away billions of dollars of gold mines to foreign corporations--platinum, everything. Now we're going to give away our greatest copper resource to a foreign corporation with no royalties, no charge--and they will shelter most of their earnings overseas. They will pay little, if anything, in U.S. taxes. Yes, their employees will pay taxes--oh, they will pay taxes. Yeah, of course. We're going to extract that out of the employees, but the company isn't going to pay. They will find a way to shelter that overseas. It's a foreign corporation. This is outrageous, absolutely outrageous. There are the issues regarding the environmental waivers and the other things that Mr. Grijalva talked about. We are going to evaluate this after the asset is transferred to the mining company. The mining company will some day go through this bizarre speculative scheme and they might pay us something in the future. Let's have a plain and simple and fair 8 percent royalty, make the taxpayers whole and run this government a little bit more responsibly, guys.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Fuel reduction and salvage are two infinitely different categories. Salvage needs to be carefully planned. We already discussed earlier, the Forest Service doesn't have the resources to do that. Yet, if we take and add that onto suppression costs, that will take money away from fuel reduction and other programs of the agency. I know around here we spend a lot of time talking about sequestration and a lot of people think it doesn't have much real impact or it's just waste coming out of the government. That came out of the fuel suppression budget. Then a bunch of the firefighting money came out of the fuel suppression budget. And now we are going to act like there was enough money in the fuel suppression budget or the firefighting budget that we could spend it on other activities. Yes, we want to do restoration activity, but at some point we have got to suck it up and make the investments we need to make in our resource agencies so they can get the job done right. We had a discussion of how to properly approach salvage earlier tonight. I'm not going to reiterate that issue. This amendment is not mandatory, but as an addition to an already inadequate account, which is stealing from other accounts, would not be good policy. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman has made the point that it is not mandatory, but the problem would be we already have inadequate funds for firefighting. As the gentleman, I'm certain, well knows, the Forest Service has devastated the remaining funds for fuel reduction, probably restoration activities, and a whole bunch of recreation activities and other things that have all been ripped from this year's budget because they had to spend $1 billion fighting fires, and I believe Congress appropriated less than half that amount. This is an annual problem, and it's time to get real around here about the problem. One is to adequately invest in fuel reduction and not underinvest in firefighting. Until we do a lot more fuel reduction across the West, we are going to have big fires. If we have big fires, we need to fight them. But we don't need to make the big fires more prevalent, more common, by cutting the fuel reduction budgets. We had this discussion a bit in committee and actually found there was some common ground in this discussion. Certainly site rehabilitation and other activities, those are very desirable. But, again, to categorize them under firefighting I think could create major problems. With that, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. LaMALFA Mr. Chairman, in speaking of inadequate funds, if we were actually generating the funds by having actual timber harvest receipts, we wouldn't be looking to the government for the money for the type of fuel reductions that are needed. We would actually be making a living at it by taking adequate marketable timber, as well as operations that go along under a timber harvest plan that requires cleanup and replanting. So we would be generating the receipts at the same time we would be doing this if we had this type of thinking involved with more of our forest management, not only in the current year where you're gaining those receipts, but in the future as you have a regenerated forest. I would harken back to Weaverville, in Trinity County, in my area, where there was a fire some years ago that nearly burned the town; but then with no management, with no restoration, the land laid idle with brush, with snags, with all sorts of things growing back and remaining behind from that fire. It burned again just 7, 8, 9 years later and almost devastated the town once again. Whereas, we see on private lands, they're out there. They're salving. They're getting the job going again and restoring the forest, which is better for the habitat, better for siltation, better for the wildlife, better for the economy, better for everybody. So let's move in the direction of fuel reductions, as my colleague from Oregon was talking about. Let's do the fuel reductions. But we don't have to do it with tax dollars. We can do it with the private sector having marketable timber being taken off and get the job done. I, again, think this amendment will really help in this regard, so I respectfully, again, seek your support for this amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, that doesn't address the concern about legally created road or trail. Again, I'm not aware that there is a definition elsewhere in the bill, nor in this amendment, for ``legally created.'' And there is tremendous controversy and litigation over the issue of ``legally created.'' It does go on to say: The fact that any road or trail is not a Forest System road or trail, or does not appear on a Motor Vehicle Use Map, shall not constitute a decision. That leaves open the issue of informal-use roads, potentially in sensitive areas, that would have to go through a process before they could be closed. What if it's a newly developed ORV trail through a sensitive meadow? We had someone running doughnuts up in a very sensitive meadow in the Three Sisters Wilderness in an area--on the edge of the Three Sisters Wilderness. I mean, did that become a road or a trail that then would be available to vehicles and we couldn't close that area? And they did, they put in big rocks and other things to close the area off to motor vehicles. Would that have been precluded under this amendment? I don't know. This opens too many questions to controversy and interpretation. There are times when we do need to act quickly when abuse is taking place. There are other times when the Forest Service has to act more deliberately. I believe the Forest Service can do a better job. I believe in having the public notified, the public fully involved; And the best way to do that on these roads is through NEPA. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Again, there are grounds for some agreement here. I agree with the gentleman from California that this very sensitive issue, access to forest lands, is critically important to people who live in, around or near the forest, or people who choose to travel there to recreate. We recently had a disastrous example in my State. The Proposed Travel Management Plan in the Wallowa-Whitman Forest, which is in Mr. Walden's district in northeast Oregon, the plan was developed in 2009, little public input; would have closed a substantial amount of the road network. It became a huge, huge controversy because of the lack of public involvement. I had complaints from my constituents and we're 250 miles away. Although I do recreate sometimes in that forest, but it's not on the road. I access the areas by forest roads. So this is something that was of major concern. A regional forester who was new said, yeah, you're right, they really screwed this up; let's do it over again. They started all over again in a very collaborative public process. But this goes a little bit beyond requiring the public to be notified and involved. In fact, it's a little contradictory because major parts of this bill do away with NEPA, which does require meaningful public involvement and response to comments by the public meaningfully by the agency. So I don't know whether we've removed that requirement from the existing law for the removal of roads and that's why we have to have this amendment or not. But this goes a little further. It says these would be legally created roads. As you know, I mean, we get people down in Nevada and elsewhere arguing with the government or even attempting to take back government property by saying these are legally created and are not the property of the Forest Service. So first you have to decide which roads are legal, which are covered, which are illegal, not covered. Who is going to decide that? The Forest Service user group who has an informal road that they have established? How will that help with this problem? It also requires the Forest Service to make a specific decision regarding a road or trail closure, including adequate and appropriate public involvement. Okay. Well, what are those standards as opposed to, say, the NEPA standards which should apply in these cases? So I think that this could actually lead to more confusion and litigation. I agree with the gentleman that there is a problem. This is a sensitive area. In some areas the Forest Service has not dealt well with it and believe there are other avenues to a solution. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I certainly don't know what is best for the Mark Twain Forest. And you had five Members sign your letter, so that would leave 430 who probably don't think they have any clue either about what would be appropriate in your forest. We do have a committee of jurisdiction. There are times when the Forest Service bureaucracy is doing things that I do not approve of. I don't believe that the committee has done any oversight on this issue. I don't know if the issue was brought to the chairman before it was offered as an amendment here on the floor. This amendment wasn't offered in committee, nor was--I was there, there was no discussion of this in committee. It's a very, very localized problem. I would suggest again, as we did earlier, that, first off, this bill is not going to become law before they're going to burn this winter--which is when they burn in the Northwest. I assume they do the same thing in your district, when the risk of fire is down because of other vegetation and when the moisture levels are higher. This isn't going to be law by then--if it ever became law. If you're doing it to get their attention, perhaps you will get their attention if they're listening. But I would suggest that the gentleman initiate a process through the committee. Ask for a meeting with the Forest Service under the auspices of the chair and attempt to get answers to the questions he has. Doing it through this particular amendment is really not going to accomplish those goals in time if indeed there are immediate plans to go forward this winter. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, actually, this wouldn't apply just to the Rim fire, as I read it. The gentleman can correct me if I'm wrong. I believe it applies to any area that burned in 2013 anywhere in the United States of America, which would certainly include both Democratic and Republican districts. Fires are not very partisan in their destruction. So that is an incredibly broad brush. That would mean there could be no analysis done by the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, or anybody else, before salvage efforts might begin on forests all across America. If you're bidding on a salvage sale, it isn't your job to care about whether or not the road you're going to build in or the area you're going to access is subject to the slope slumping when the rain starts in a couple of months or the snows come in the inner mountain regions or up in the Northwest. So this is extraordinarily and overly broad. We've already exempted things up to 10,000 acres. I believe there's a better way to approach this. The other gentleman from California talked about getting in there and then we would have the money for strike teams. I would say that's just a little bit backwards. These are public assets. This fire is a disaster not only for the people of your district, the people of California, but the people of the Nation, particularly with the proximity to one of the Nation's most loved parks. If we did have a strike team, we could have areas like that surveyed by spring and plans in place by spring to know where it might be appropriate to salvage and where it isn't appropriate to salvage, and it would still be valuable. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Well, the Forest Service isn't always responsive, but I believe if the committee chairman--in fact, I would be happy to join as the ranking member with the committee chairman and the gentleman from Montana and any other members of the committee interested in a letter to the Forest Service saying, Hey, you produce all this incredible amount of data. Some people think it's too much. So how about a one- page executive summary that covers these points, which would precede the other 18 pages online--they don't have to print them, so there's no cost to the government--I think that might solve this problem. I don't believe we need to pass a law to get an executive summary. I mean, most Federal agencies provide executive summaries of all sorts of stuff for people who don't have time or interest in knowing things in more detail. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I have the right to close, and I'm prepared to close if the gentleman wants to summarize his previous arguments.

Mr. DeFAZIO. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, the previous amendment was going to limit public access to information. Now we're going to ask the public, the Forest Service, to produce more information. Although, actually, we aren't asking them to produce more information. We're asking them to produce less information than they currently make publicly available. It would require an annual report to Congress as a result of implementing title I, amendment requiring an annual report, volume of timber, cost of preparing timber sales, revenue from the sales, and how it's distributed to counties on one page. Well, the Forest Service does prepare these reports on a quarterly basis--it is available online--but no, it's not one page. I guess we could put it on one page. I'm having trouble reading it at this scale, which is 18 pages. This is the 18-page report for the Beaverhead- Deerlodge Forest. If we look at the report, they offer 3.4 million board feet of timber, the amount of timber delayed, withdrawn from sale, what was successfully bid on, what didn't get any bids. There are also quarterly cut and sold reports, showing the value of these sales. In the first quarter of 2013, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge sold $312,000 worth of timber, nearly all of it Lodgepole pine. If we limit it to one page, we might lose other things, like the report on Christmas trees--$6,050 value for sales of Christmas trees; mushrooms, $1,500 in the Bitterroot National Forest. So the Forest Service is already producing this information. They are posting it online. I know it's kind of de rigueur around here to say let's get it all down to one page. Well, we could put it on one page, but you're going to need a microscope to read it, unless you want to leave out a lot of the stuff we're getting. And that's kind of interesting, if you really want to know what's going on in the forest. If you want to know valid bids, no bids, delayed bids, withdrawn, resold, re-offered, regular sales, cancelled, opted other volume, resold, re-offered, previous fiscal year volume, replacement volume, I mean, how are you going to fit all this stuff on one page? So we're just going to tell them, ``Don't bother anymore to produce this data. We don't want it. The public doesn't want it''? So under the guise of asking for information, we're actually going to tell the Forest Service to produce less, which, you know, they might be kind of happy with because they will be less accountable if they produce less information. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time a I may consume. Again, this is an area where we do have some grounds for potential agreement. Part of the problem is the Forest Service budget. Not only are they spending half their budget on fighting fires, they've had a brain drain because of cuts in personnel and staffing, and they really don't have the personnel to go out. I suggested a number of years ago, the last time we had a salvage rider, that a great alternative would be to have the Forest Service establish a strike team to go out to major fires--in fact, while they're probably still burning--and begin to map out a recovery effort--where it might be appropriate to go in and do some salvage, where there are critical watersheds at risk and there's going to have to be some immediate mitigation with the planting of grass or other efforts to mitigate problems that will come with the rainy season in a few months in California. I believe there is a better way to get there. But there's a new kind of current trend online. It's called throw-back Thursday. To me, this is really throw-back Thursday to one of the most controversial pieces of legislation ever adopted by this body back in the 1990s, which was a massive salvage rider. I have participated in a much more discrete, individual process when I was first here as a sophomore Member of Congress with Senator Mark Hatfield from Oregon. We sat down with an area that had been burned and we negotiated and legislated a salvage which preserved the areas that needed to be preserved. There was a potential for 186 million board feet. We ended up legislating somewhere around 70 million board feet. The industry was disappointed. The environmentalists were appalled. But in the end, we got no additional sedimentation, we didn't get any slope slumping, and we did get 70 million board feet of timber out of there. We didn't build a road into a sensitive, roadless area. We did it with helicopter logging. And the Forest Service still made money. So there are ways to do this. But this, I don't think, is the best way to go forward. The underlying legislation already allows significant waivers of NEPA. Any project less than 10,000 acres is not required to go through an analysis. But this would allow a project to move forward no matter what the size or where it's located, without judicial review, if the project is salvaged, dead, damaged, or downed timber in an area impacted by fire this year. We don't really know yet. I don't think a lot of the areas of Rim fire have yet been surveyed. Certainly, the Forest Service doesn't have the assets to do and find out what the impacts were--where the spot burns are, where the through burns are, what the conditions are, what areas would be critical to surviving wildlife, what areas are critical to watersheds and how we will deal with those areas, how we're going to recover the recreation in that area in the future, what would happen with building of roads and logging and salvage logging in those areas. So I believe that this is a bridge too far in terms of expediting recovery and/or potentially salvage efforts, and I would oppose the amendment. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I'm prepared to close.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Like many here tonight, I'm frustrated by the seemingly endless appeals and litigation on efforts to responsibly manage our forests, but not all appeals and litigation are frivolous. We know that some zero-cut groups seeking to end all logging in national forests have been successful in nitpicking the Forest Service's submission in Montana. However, this amendment literally tips the scales of justice. The underlying bill already places extraordinary restrictions on parties--which I mentioned earlier, over which I have concern--on parties seeking to protect public resources. Do we really want to tell people they can't protest a government activity if the Federal Government violates a procedural requirement? Failing to give notice of a major activity is a procedural requirement. Shouldn't the community be able to appeal an activity that's moving forward if they think it might impact their drinking water and they were never notified about the proposal? Failing to properly advertise for bids is a procedural requirement. Shouldn't a small business be able to stop a project from being awarded to an out-of-State company if the Forest Service failed to follow proper contracting protocol? The underlying bill already has numerous provisions that accelerate the approval of the projects and makes litigation much more difficult. We don't need to tip the scales further towards the power of Big Government and away from the public. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.