At Senate hearing, Daines touts bill that could create large fire breaks

Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines and California Democrat Sen. Diane Feinstein made their case for a new bill designed to stem wildfire spread in western states by creating fuel breaks, encouraging biomass plants to burn the wood and generally cutting down dead and dying trees, during a Senate hearing last week.

The “Emergency Wildfire and Public Safety Act,” is a rare $100 million bipartisan bill that allows for fuel breaks and large timber projects while limiting court challenges to some projects.

“We’ve got to better manage these forests and they’ll manage us,” Daines said during a hearing in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week.

The bill does not allow logging in critical habitat for Endangered Species, inventoried roadless areas, designated wilderness or wild and scenic river corridors, to name a few. But it does allow the Forest Service to declare “emergency” salvage of dead and dying trees of up to 10,000 acres and create fuel breaks of up to 1,000 feet wide near roads, trails, transmission lines and other features without environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“Let me be blunt,” Feinstein told the committee. “California is on fire.”

She noted that the state has seen some 2.3 million acres of wildfires this year with 4,200 homes destroyed.

“We have to address the dead and dying trees,” she said.

Daines pointed to the Bridger Hills fire that destroyed 28 structures this summer near Bozeman.

He called the bill a “bold, broad, bipartisan solution.”

The bill also has provisions to encourage development of biomass

plants to burn the harvested trees, with grants up to $750,000 for businesses to start or expand biomass production.

F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber in Columbia Falls already has a biomass plant, one of the few in the region. The bill also calls for more prescribed burns and incentives to train people to enter the forest workforce. The bill was not without its critics. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Wisconsin) wondered what had happened to the funding and the projects in the 2018 Farm Bill. That bill allowed for collaborative timber projects between the states and the Forest service. There have been projects done locally under the plan, called Good Neighbor Authority.

In particular, logging projects have been done along the Hungry Horse Reservoir and the canyon, near homes. But not all of those projects result in very merchantable timber.

One project, for example, simply mowed down young trees in forests near homes, as they provide ladder fuel for larger fires.