The House on Thursday passed a bill to speed up environmental reviews for forest management and wildfire treatment projects following fires that that have ravaged Los Angeles in recent weeks.
House lawmakers passed the Fix Our Forests Act by a 279-141 vote. Sixty-four Democrats joined 215 Republicans in voting for the bill.
The bill passed the House last September, but not the Senate. It would allow fireside management projects like thinning, prescribed burning, and hazard tree removal to occur under existing categorical exclusions from the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires agencies to analyze the impacts of their potential actions on the environment.
Categorical exclusion would also be granted for vegetation management, facility inspection and management plans for utility line rights-of-way, according to a section-by-section summary.
It also prohibits courts from "holding unlawful, setting aside, limiting, delaying, staying, vacating, or enjoining a fireshed management project, unless the project poses a risk of proximate and substantial environmental harm and no other equitable remedy is available,” according to the summary.
In a speech before the vote, House Natural Resources Committee Chair Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., said that without the changes proposed in the bill, completing a single forest management project takes an average of three to five years. He said the bill came after years of hard work and bipartisan collaboration.
“Fixing our forests should not be a partisan issue,” he said. “And today, it’s not."
However, House Natural Resources Committee ranking member Jared Huffman, D-Calif., called the bill “flawed.” He praised provisions that would reauthorize the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program and the Joint Chiefs Landscape Restoration Partnership, as well as language that would create an interagency Fireshed Center to analyze and publish fire and smoke data.
But Huffman argued the bill also “inappropriately co-opts emergency authorities under the National Environmental Policy Act, undercuts the Endangered Species Act and even makes it more difficult for communities to engage or scrutinize, or even know about projects that could impact them.”
“Clearly, we’ve got a lot more work to do and this bill misses the mark by failing to advance that work,” Huffman said.
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