|
(Continued from page 2)
• This week, I signed onto legislation that offers greater protections for prevention efforts. After all, the best way to fight a wildfire is to prevent it altogether. The Wildfire Disaster Funding Act simply changes the way we budget for fighting wildfires. Currently, any additional funding needed to fight emergency wildfires is pulled from prevention programs, including some that are important to pine beetle efforts in the Black Hills. More specifically, we prioritize timber harvest, grazing management and other activities in this bill by protecting the funding that goes to these important programs.
• This is the next in a series of steps we've taken to beat the beetle in recent years.
• In November 2013, I brought U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell to view the damage first hand. He came away from that meeting recognizing that we have the tools to combat the pine beetle, but we need to be able to apply them on a larger scale. That takes reforms on the federal level.
• I included some of those reforms in the 2014 Farm Bill. More specifically, we streamlined environmental red tape, helped get boots on the ground faster, and allowed the Forest Service to work on a larger scale in many cases. So far, nearly one million acres of the Black Hills National Forest has benefited from these provisions.
• Through other efforts, we were also able to secure more than $3 million in fed (Continued on page 4)
|
|
