[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16385-16386]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            FORESTRY POLICY

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I am speaking in morning business with my 
colleague and friend Senator Merkley to talk about forestry policy and 
to give the Senate a little bit of an update on where we are because we 
have so many resource-dependent communities that have been devastated 
as a result of a variety of policies. I want to touch briefly, and then 
yield to Senator Merkley, on what some of those elements are.
  No. 1 is that our softwood lumber producers are now in a titanic 
battle with the Canadians, fighting the Canadian system of heavily 
subsidizing their industry, thereby cutting ours. A group of 25 
Senators--a quarter of the Senate--have joined me in an effort so that 
our trade representative pushes back and continues to fight this 
unjust, inequitable system until we no longer see Oregon and American 
jobs destroyed as a result of the Canadians' unfairly subsidizing their 
industry.
  No. 2, we feel very strongly about getting the harvest up in a 
sustainable fashion. We know there is an awful lot of work to do in the 
woods. We can do it with an environmental ethic, with an ethic of 
forest health, and I strongly support that. I have introduced 
legislation to do that in my home State and have been supportive of 
colleagues' efforts to do it in their parts of the country.
  The reality is--and the Forest Service has said this--you would have 
to increase logging on our public lands by 400 percent in order to no 
longer need a third leg of the forestry stool, which is the Secure 
Rural Schools program.
  I want it understood that we are going to push back against 
inequitable trade practices that are hurting jobs in rural Oregon and 
rural America. We are going to support increasing the harvest in a 
sustainable fashion, but there is no realistic increase that might 
possibly win passage here in Washington and be upheld legally that 
involves taking the harvest up to 400 percent. You are going to need a 
safety net.
  Senator Merkley and I, Senator Crapo, Senator Risch, and many 
colleagues on both sides of the aisle have fought to get this program, 
which has now expired, extended for one more year. This program began 
in 2000 as a result of a bipartisan piece of legislation, which Senator 
Craig and I authored, called the Secure Rural Schools bill. It now 
benefits more than 700 counties, and we see it benefiting communities 
all over the country. This program is depended on for education. It is 
depended on for roads. It is depended on in many areas for law 
enforcement. Unfortunately, our colleagues have not been willing to 
extend it. Senator Merkley and I, and Senator Crapo and Senator Risch, 
in a bipartisan way, have wanted to work in the Senate to get this 
extended, but to put these vital county payments on the back burner 
would be an enormous mistake.
  I want to yield the remainder of our time to my friend and colleague, 
but there are really three legs to this stool: fight unfair trade 
practices, get the harvest up in a sustainable kind of fashion, and 
understand that you are not going to be able to meet the needs of hard-
hit rural communities without the safety net program--the Secure Rural 
Schools program.
  Senator Crapo, Senator Risch, Senator Merkley, and I are going to 
keep coming back here again and again until we get it reauthorized.
  I yield the remainder of our time to Senator Merkley.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of my colleague 
from Oregon, who, back in the year 2000, fought so hard to right a 
wrong. The wrong was that a variety of measures related to these 
timbered acres reduced the ability to pull as much harvest off as in 
the past. Part of that was the fact that there was simply a lot of 
second growth that wasn't ready to be cut yet. Another was a variety of 
rules related to environmental protections, to forest fire prevention. 
There were a whole series of things.
  The bottom line is that these counties, which originally had these 
lands before they transferred them to Federal Government for 
safekeeping, are dependent upon revenue from the timber sales on these 
lands. My colleague pointed out that those timber sales simply can 
can't operate at the same level to provide the resources those counties 
operated on. Much as with Payments in Lieu of Taxes, or the PILT 
program, we stepped in--my colleague stepped in and led the effort to 
honor the promise made to those counties. We have been doing so now for 
16 years.
  One of the challenges that has emerged is that we reauthorize it only 
for a short period of time. We say we will still honor the promise but 
only for a year or only for 2 years, which means the counties never 
know what is going to be coming. They are really caught in limbo. 
Because they are rural counties--they don't have a great amount of 
manufacturing; a lot of the counties don't have a lot of farmland--they 
are really dependent upon the forest industry as the heart of their 
economy. This is very important to them.
  We need to honor the promise to these counties, just as we have 
through the PILT program. It is a situation we can debate at whatever 
level that should be, but it needs to be a long-term commitment to this 
promise to these counties. Remember, these were county lands that were 
transferred back to the Federal Government to essentially hold in trust 
for them.
  I share with my colleague the desire that we address this in a 
fashion that provides a strong foundation, a strong commitment to the 
promise made to rural America, to rural forested counties. As 
mentioned, 720 counties in 41 States--that is a pretty significant deal 
across the country. We need to act, and we need to act now.
  I turn this back over to my colleague.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I am going to wrap this up simply by saying 
a program like this has generated a tremendous amount of community 
involvement. There are advisory committees that bring the industry and 
environmental folks together. That is what we are going to need to get 
this job done right. It is called collaborative forestry. The Secure 
Rural Schools program is something that Senator Merkley and I want to 
reauthorize. It is a textbook case for what you want to do for 
collaborative forestry.
  We didn't even really get into forest health because we all know our 
forests, particularly in the West, are burning up, so Senator Risch, 
Senator Crapo, and I went into something called fire borrowing, which 
is an extraordinarily inefficient policy that discourages prevention 
with respect to fire.
  We are going to be back to talk about the nuts and bolts of sensible 
forest policy. We need to build on this collaborative effort, as we 
have sought to do in our O&C bill--the bill that Senator Merkley and I 
have been involved with--which will double the harvest, on average, for 
the next 50 years, according to the experts. We want it to be 
understood that we are going to be fighting on a number of fronts. We 
will fight with respect to the trade policy, which is long overdue, as 
it relates to getting a fair shake for our softwood lumber producers 
and value-added forestry. We are going to focus on collaborative 
approaches and get the harvest up in a sustainable way.
  Senator Merkley has talked about the promise of Secure Rural Schools, 
and I feel it is very regrettable that when Senator Crapo and Senator 
Risch tried to convince the other side of the aisle to accept Secure 
Rural Schools now, we couldn't get it done.
  I think anybody who knows us knows we are persistent, and you don't 
get anything important done without bipartisan support. That is the way 
we will approach our forestry policy in the days ahead.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.

[[Page 16386]]

  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cassidy). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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