WASHINGTON — Months after wildfires ravaged Los Angeles County, California Sen. Alex Padilla is hoping his bill to overhaul forest management and prevent wildfires might be the first bipartisan measure for President Trump to sign.
“I don’t think anything could completely prevent wildfires, but through this work, if we can prevent just one more community from experiencing the heartbreak felt by the families in Santa Rosa or in Paradise or the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, then this effort would’ve been worth it,” Padilla said Thursday.
Padilla, who chairs the Senate Wildfire Caucus, joined with a bipartisan group of senators from the West — Sens. John Curtis (R-Utah), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) — to introduce the Fix Our Forests Act, which mirrors a bipartisan measure of the same name that the House passed in January.
The Fix Our Forests Act would usher in sweeping changes to how the federal government manages its land — which constitutes 45% of the uninhabited, wildfire-prone land in California, according to the Congressional Research Service. It would create a wildfire intelligence center to centralize federal management, require assessments of fireshed areas and streamline how communities reduce their wildfire risk. It also would ramp up research into wildfire mitigation technologies and change some forestation treatments.
Although the House handily passed the measure, it was not completely welcome among environmental groups. Dozens wrote a letter decrying the measure for rolling back protections for endangered species and removing accountability against “extractive industries.”
“Gutting wildlife protections and community input on managing our public lands have never made forests healthier or reduced wildfire risk, and that won’t change with this legislation,” Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement Thursday. “Not a single community will be safer from wildfires if this becomes law.”
Padilla argued that his bill improved upon issues brought by those groups, including adding a provision for prescribed burns, “building on the expertise and experience of Native American tribes that have been implementing prescribed fires for generations.”
The Senate version also redefined projects eligible for grants, “to make sure that the L.A. would be eligible right now,” said Matt Weiner, chief executive and founder of the advocacy organization Megafire Action, which pushed for the legislation.
“I think it’s pretty crazy, frankly, that we’re on the cusp of getting to the president’s desk here a bill that he could sign into law that would be bipartisan and one of the most comprehensive rewrites of federal wildfire policy in decades,” Weiner said. “Amid all the chaos, there’s an opportunity to do something really meaningful here in a bipartisan way.”
The legislation started with an airplane conversation between Democratic Rep. Scott Peters of San Diego and his Republican colleague Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas. The two were traveling together on an international congressional trip, when Westerman sat beside Peters and asked if he could tell him a story about California’s sequoias.
“He couldn’t get away,” Westerman said with a laugh. As a licensed forester, Westerman wanted to overhaul federal forest management. Peters, an environmental lawyer by trade who came to Congress to push climate solutions, was “interested because it’s California.”
“The people in the 1970s who drew up our environmental laws were meeting the challenges of those days,” Peters said in January. “Time is our enemy. … The longer we wait, the more we have these catastrophic fires. And I just think that environmental groups haven’t caught up with that, some of them.”
A previous version of the bill passed the House but was not taken up for a vote in the Senate. Westerman and Peters reintroduced it in January on the heels of the L.A. fires, hoping they could capture their colleagues’ attention.
“The great thing about this bill is we can do something outside of disaster,” Westerman said at the time. “This is about preventing future disasters.”
California’s leaders — including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Cal Fire Chief Joe Tyler — applauded the Senate version of the bill. Newsom pointed to his own efforts temporarily lifting state regulations to speed up rebuilding in the wake of the L.A. fires.
“The Fix Our Forest Act is a step forward that will build on this progress — enabling good projects to happen faster on federal lands,” Newsom said in a statement.
