Coloradans know all too well the increasing threats they face due to wildfire, and the reality is: The threat isn’t going away. With much of the state experiencing drought, wildfires are impacting the health and safety of our communities from the Western Slope to the Front Range. This summer more than 200,000 acres of land has burned.
Lawmakers are understandably eager to find solutions to the wildfire crisis, including the Colorado delegation. Unfortunately, the Fix Our Forests Act, now moving through Congress, still includes provisions that would do more harm than good. We find this unacceptable at a time when the Trump administration continues to systematically dismantle our public land management agencies.
The bill does include some good consensus-based recommendations developed by the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. That 50-member, nonpartisan group was tasked by Congress to offer solutions to the wildfire crisis and recovery. The commission produced a report in September 2023 with 148 recommendations, most of them good. However, there is still much room for improvement.
As county commissioners representing Jefferson and Routt counties, the Fix Our Forests Act would be something we could enthusiastically support if it stuck only to the recommendations. Unfortunately, it also includes provisions that would hinder the ability of Coloradans to provide input on management of their public lands.
The legislation weakens the public’s ability to use the judicial system, one of the few remaining backstops against the Trump administration and Congress, to question the administration’s actions, like its focus on doubling logging targets on our forests without consideration for future generations. These proposed provisions include limiting the amount of time someone has to legally challenge a decision on public lands to 150 days from six years, effectively eliminating the public from holding federal agencies accountable.
It is incomprehensible why we would hand this administration more tools to harm our public lands while making it nearly impossible for communities to challenge projects in court that threaten their ways of life. Cutting the public out of the process is not the answer to fixing our forests.
Equally egregious is the bill’s exclusion of the public from important decision-making processes under the National Environmental Policy Act, our nation’s cornerstone environmental protection law. Specifically, the bill would expand categorical exclusions, or CEs — a tool to streamline projects — for activities like insect and disease and hazardous fuels reduction from 3,000 acres to 10,000 acres (or 15 square miles). That is an unfathomable size — about double the size of Colorado’s largest ski resort’s 5,317 acres — that is sure to result in land management errors and damage that cannot be undone.
The Forest Service already conducts 85% of land management projects on National Forest lands under existing CEs. The Fix Our Forests Act would increase that number to virtually all projects, even for nonemergency projects.
Colorado’s forests need sustainable solutions. Science-backed tools like prescribed burns, thinning, and well-funded and staffed land management agencies are the keys to unlock healthy and biologically diverse forests.
Unfortunately, the director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought, has added fuel to the fire for Colorado’s current blazes. In private speeches in 2023 and 2024, Vought stated his goal of putting federal employees “in trauma,” adding: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
This administration has coerced more than 4,000 Forest Service employees to accept deferred resignation or early retirement offers, and of that group about 1,400 held “red cards” — qualifications that allow them to assist with wildland fire fighting efforts. Those who are left to do the work, such as the incident management team that successfully battled the Crosho fire in Routt County, face monumental challenges and the demands of doing more with less.
The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management in Colorado are feeling the impact of these staff reductions. About 35% of BLM staff positions in Colorado are vacant, and 41 staff members at Colorado’s largest national forest — the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison — took buyouts. Passing the Fix Our Forests Act while defunding and shrinking the staff of the land management agencies is not a workable solution.
We appreciate the Colorado delegation’s efforts to include in the bill requests brought by fire chiefs and special districts that might help with wildfire mitigation. But the delegation must work to strike the problematic provisions. Congress has bipartisan, noncontroversial solutions for the wildfire crisis that are backed by science.
Our senators and representatives would do well to stick to those consensus recommendations, and to unite in a bipartisan effort to ensure the Forest Service and BLM have the staff and budget needed to manage our beloved public lands and protect communities from increasingly severe wildfires.
Andy Kerr, of Lakewood, is a Jefferson County commissioner and former state legislator.
Sonja Macys, of Steamboat Springs, is a Routt County commissioner and is a member of the U.S. Forest Service’s Greater Rocky Mountain Resource Advisory Committee.
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