Ed Diehl - Forest Management

As Oregon heads into another hot weekend, Oregon House Republicans are calling on the state Legislature to reform forest management and logging policies they say would prevent large fires from starting and spreading. 

In a letter sent Wednesday, Republican Reps. Jeff Helfrich of Hood River, Ed Diehl of Stayton and E. Werner Reschke of Malin said lawmakers should roll back regulations and conservation plans to allow more logging on state forests, limit liabilities for volunteer firefighters who might cause injury or property damage while on the job and prohibit and sweep homeless encampments in fire prone areas. 

 

About 1,650 wildfires this season have burned a record of more than 1.5 million acres in Oregon. But about 75% were not in forests but across grass and shrubland in eastern Oregon, according to the Wildland Mapping Institute.