HENDERSON, Nev., Dec. 6 (UPI) -- Forest health, drought relief, and energy issues topped the action plan approved Friday at the Western Governors Association winter meetings outside Las Vegas where the state executives repeated their anxious desires for unified and effective legislation on issues that affect their states but remain under federal jurisdiction.
Western state governors will approach the newly revamped Congress next year with a list of priorities for federal assistance that includes some of the same regional issues that fell through the cracks during the last congressional session.
"The federal government should be a partner in this, and we ought to remind them of that," outgoing Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer said, bemoaning the fact that a comprehensive energy bill failed to make it out of 107th Congress.
When the 108th Congress convenes after the first of the year, bills that died in the 107th Congress will have to be resurected while cash-strapped states continue to wait.
"In the next year, I will be focused advancing western transportation needs during congressional consideration of the highway transportation reauthorization legislation," said Nebraska Gov. and WGA Vice Chairman Mike Johanns, using an example of one such high-priced item that the states depend on Uncle Sam to provide.
Other items on the governors' list that remained unfulfilled were drought relief for the region's ranchers and farmers, and a plan to thin out overgrown forests in order to prevent the outbreak of massive forest fires that annually blacken millions of acres of timber and cause large chunks of state firefighting budgets to go up in smoke as well.
Such issues created plenty of headlines and political arguments this year, however the energy bill proved to be too big to get out of the Senate while President Bush's Healthy Forest Initiative came too late and brought with it the sticky issue of which trees should be cut and just who has a voice in deciding whether or not they would be cut at all.
Montana Gov. Judy Martz said that in the past year, she testified before Congress three times in her capacity as chairwoman of the WGA about the need to accelerate the thinning of forests that have become overgrown. She told United Press International that while Congress took on a new look following the November elections, she did not think the WGA would be starting from scratch in convincing Congress to pass the president's plan.
"I have seen such a change in attitude," she said. "It used to be that we would have major fires in Montana, but nobody (in Congress) cared because it was just Montana," Martz opined.
While there might be a perception that liberals and conservatives were dug in on opposite sides of the issue, Martz contended that the congressional delegation from the West was prepared to tackle the matter in a bipartisan manner.
"If they ran, they know about it," she said. "It's a people issue."
The debate over cleaning out federal forests in the West centers largely on the need to remove fuel that can lead to devastating fires and the mistrust that environmentalists hold toward timber companies that they fear will use fuels reduction as an excuse to cut down old-growth trees that aren't a true fire hazard.
Many western lawmakers have demanded that the appeals process used to challenge U.S. Forest Service thinning projects be scaled back, although Martz said the WGA was not advocating a complete scuttling of the process.
"You can't just eliminate it," she pointed out. "Nobody is saying the public sector shouldn't have an ability to appeal, but there has to be a better way to do it."
The Bush fuels proposal unveiled late in the summer was a reflection of the conventional wisdom about forestry that existed in the state capitals, however there appeared to be a difference of opinion with the WGA on the question of energy.
"The current administration is friendlier toward the western states than the last one, but I already see some indications that the Beltway mentality is resurfacing," Wyoming's Geringer, the WGA's point man on energy issues, told his fellow governors.
Geringer was speaking primarily of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's desires to raise the efficiency and capacity of the nation's electricity grid and the agency's insistence on having the authority to decide where new power transmission lines will be built.
Geringer, along with other governors such as Gray Davis of California, are wary of allowing Washington to have complete control over the power lines that are vital to the states.
"Transmission remains the focus of a lot of things," he said.
The WGA is scheduled to take its show into Washington in February for meetings with administration officials and congressional leaders, and Geringer and Martz vowed to present a bipartisan front.
"We are quite different from Congress in regards to the amount of rhetoric that is not generated," Geringer said in what sounded like a quip but did not raise a grin from the Wyoming Republican.
Meanwhile, sleepy-eyed slot players in the casino down the hall at the Green Valley Ranch resort were striving to fulfill their Vegas dreams in the same quiet and determined fashion that the WGA hoped would help them hit the jackpot in Congress.
"The passion is there," she said, "but we don't do a lot of shouting."
