Colorado gets jump-start on bills for '08 Congress

The Denver Post ^ | 12/22/2007 | Anne C. Mulkern

[george76]

Before Congress left for this year, lawmakers in Colorado's delegation put down their markers for next year.

"You can never start soon enough," said Alan Salazar, chief of staff to Rep. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs. With the presidential election next year, he said, passing bills could become difficult.

"So the sooner you get things done, the easier it is," Salazar said.

Udall is one of those who introduced a bill in the last two weeks before the congressional session ended.

Sen. Salazar's bill asks to study ways to protect the open space in and around Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests. It's the Senate version of a bill Udall had introduced in the House.

Udall, meanwhile, introduced a bill that pairs with one Salazar had offered in the Senate. Udall's legislation requires a study of ways to fix long-standing environmental and water-quality problems at Fountain Creek watershed. Rep. John Salazar, D-Manassa, co-sponsors that bill.

Udall also offered one to match a bill from Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. That one would require Interior Department agencies and the Forest Service to give Congress an annual report on firefighter safety practices, training programs and ...

[george76]

Mark Udall is so far to the left that very little of what he has proposed has passed.

I'm for forest fire fighting safety, but Udall has always been a Sierra Club toady. The Sierra Club reflexively opposes forest thinning, forest road building, and preparing clear cut fire breaks. As a result, where 10 years ago, a 300 square mile fire was unusually large, we had two 800 square mile fires and one 1000 square mile fire this year.

The homeowners around Lake Tahoe who got burned out this summer publicly blamed the Sierra Club for going to court to slow and stop road building which would have allowed thinning.

These big fires are leaving a huge carbon footprint both by dumping monsterous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and by burning so hot that they make it difficult to reforest the land. Trees grow by taking Carbon Dioxide from the air and converting it to wood.

It is estimated that it will take 700 years to reforest the Hayman fire area. One Hayman area that had been thinned as a forest service experiment didn't burn so hot that the forest died. This suggests that common sense thinning will make the forests more healthy.

Mark Udall has proposed some small scale thinning around ski resorts to avoid a repeat of the Tahoe complaints, but opposes anything that would prevent a large scale hot fire in Colorado. No road building was to be allowed. Even that small compromise appears to be opposed by the Sierra Club types.

The Sierra Club might have once had lofty goals, but they no longer allow common sense to interfere with their agenda. Unfortunately, Mark Udall is taking so much money from the Sierra Club that he doesn't use common sense, either.

by Anon

[george76]

Alan Salazar...