National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson praised House passage of the Fix Our Forests Act (H.R. 8790), which streamlines and strengthens existing federal processes to allow electric co-ops to better address essential maintenance activities critical to reducing wildfire risk.
“As small, not-for-profit entities, bureaucratic hurdles and red tape fall particularly hard on electric co-ops as they work to maintain their infrastructure on public lands,” Matheson said. “The Fix Our Forests Act includes crucial improvements to grid hardening and wildfire mitigation procedures that will help co-ops better address wildfire hazards on utility rights-of-way and better protect the communities they serve.
“We are grateful to House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) and Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) for championing this important legislation.”
The federal government owns approximately 640 million acres of land in the United States. And those federal lands are home to roughly 90,000 miles of electrical distribution and transmission rights-of-way. Electric co-ops and their consumer-members are responsible for the costs of maintaining and repairing this infrastructure, which are exacerbated by duplicative and protracted regulatory requirements.
The bill will help ease these regulatory burdens as co-ops work to maintain electric infrastructure and defend against wildfires.
