AP photo/Denver Post, Shaun Stanley
Montrose firefighter Lawrence Sanderson hoses down a smoldering log next to the famous Spruce Tree House ruins within Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado on Wednesday.
By DAVID PHINNEY
Chieftain Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - A special provision to reduce the threat of fires in South Dakota's Black Hills has ignited a growing outcry among Western state senators for similar protection for forest thinning projects in their states.
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., joined a bipartisan coalition of a dozen senators at a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday to ask for legislation that would waive environmental regulations as a means to speed up thinning of the nation's national forests.
Led by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the senators said their states deserve the same treatment as South Dakota, where a new federal law allows the thinning of trees, undergrowth and brush from the Black Hills National Forest and Beaver Creek Roadless Area without the threat of environmental lawsuits.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. slipped the Black Hills provision into the $29-billion defense supplemental spending bill several weeks ago.
"We need to apply similar (protections) to the rest of the states in the West," Domenici said. "We have forests just ready to burn. They are loaded with fuel and just ready to burn."
Campbell said the high cost of wildfires and the damage they do justified speeding up the forest-thinning effort.
"We're all going to pay for it"
They should ask Dashchle Dysfunction to pay for this.