In a letter to House and Senate Appropriations Committee leadership, NASF and two dozen other signatories requested hurricane recovery support for southern forests.
We respectfully ask that you:
- Extend or renew the USDA’s 2017 Wildfires and Hurricanes Indemnity Program (WHIP) to provide landowners, especially where insurance is cost-prohibitive, with some recovery of lost value, and ensure that commercial silviculture in working forests that remain forests is eligible.
- Expand federal assistance to state forestry agencies that allows them to collect post-storm Forest Inventory and Analysis data in affected areas.
- Provide funding to state forestry agencies for landowner reforestation assistance programs to ensure damaged forests are promptly restored, for addressing increased post-hurricane threats to forest health from invasive species, and for additional wildfire response capacity due to increased wildfire risk from down timber.
- Support codification of the casualty loss provisions in the Forest Recovery Act (H.R. 4962) to allow all affected landowners to deduct the full value of their lost timber. Current law allows only claims by landowners in a presidentially-declared disaster area and only for a small fraction of the loss.
- Allow 100% expensing of all reforestation/establishment costs for the year in which they occur
- Allow expedited permitting for temporary wet deck storage areas.
- Expand the 2014 Farm Bill “Good Neighbor Authority” to authorize state forestry agency to help the U.S. Forest Service salvage damaged timber from federal lands.
Click here to see the final letter in full.
Have questions? Contact Communications Director Whitney Forman-Cook at wforman-cook@stateforesters.org.