February 26, 2020 3:25 a.m.
In a hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday, Oregon’s U.S. Senator Ron Wyden pressed the chief of the U.S. Forest Service for an update on implementation of the “fire borrowing” ‘fix” and the agency’s plan to prioritize the 2.5 million acres backlog of hazardous fuels and wildfire prevention projects in Oregon.
A release from Wyden said in 2018, Congress passed his Wildfire Disaster Funding Act to end the practice of “fire borrowing” which for years forced the Forest Service to raid fire prevention and other forest health funding accounts to pay to put out increasingly large and expensive fires.
During the hearing, Wyden said money should be available because “we finally said we are not going to have this bizarre policy where we keep raiding prevention money to fight big fires”. He said if prevention money is no longer being raided, prevention money can be used to hit those targets. Wyden asked Forest Service Chief Vicki Christensen for month-to-month treatment targets for reducing hazardous fuels in Oregon.
There is a link to watch the exchange between Wyden and Christensen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JQf_RwqMIE&feature=youtu.be