After Colorado faced its worst fire season on record in 2020, freshman House Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., introduced legislation to mitigate wildfires, as the West grapples with devastating burns, heat waves and drought.

The Active Forest Management, Wildfire Prevention and Community Protection Act would pay for the removal of trees killed by bark beetles and establish Forest Reserve Revenue Areas to sell timber.

Boebert, who serves on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in an interview with The Durango Herald that the bill would require the U.S. Forest Service to harvest a minimum of 6 billion board feet of lumber annually.

The logging would reduce wildfires and costs of wildfire suppression while protecting nearby communities, a strategy that federal agencies have failed to recognize, she said.

“That is a flawed approach, which causes us to spend billions of dollars on the back end to suppress fire, neglecting fire prevention and putting our communities at increasing risk of catastrophic fire,” she told the Herald.

Twenty-five percent of logging revenue would be retained locally. The bill also would make it harder for groups that oppose forest thinning to take legal measures.

Read the full article at The Durango Herald