Talk Business & Politics Daily: The convention wrap-up, Westerman in the woods, Sunday preview edition

In today’s Talk Business & Politics Daily digital newscast, Rep. Bruce Westerman discusses his efforts to improve forest management, we wrap up the Cleveland GOP convention, and preview Sunday’s TV news program.

Also, in our top stories we recap the death of Don Soderquist, one of the keepers of the Wal-Mart culture.

WESTERMAN AND THE WOODS
Rep. Bruce Westerman, who is a forester and engineer, has been vigilant about pushing for new policy to upkeep federal forestlands. He contends that more money is spent to fight fires that do major damage when some of the emergency money could be spent for preventive efforts.

KATV’s Elicia Dover interviewed Westerman last week.

Dover: I want to move on to some work that you are doing on Capitol Hill. You recently passed the Federal Forest Act. Can you explain what that is and what is fire borrowing?

Rep. Westerman: I am on the Natural Resources Committee. I happen to be the only forester in the House or the Senate and, last year, I was the lead sponsor of the Resilient Federal Forest Act of 2015, and this is to address management issues on our federal timberland.

One of the problems that continues to escalate are wild fires. We are spending more money to fight wildfires than we are to manage our forests across the country. Last year, we had 10 million acres of forest land burn up. We are not taking good care of a very treasured resource and as a result we are spending all the forest service budget or a big majority of it on fighting fires.

So part of what was in the Resilient Federal Forest act was to end this practice of fire borrowing and, if we had a catastrophic event, to put the funding to take care of these forest fires under FEMA instead of taking it out of the forest service budget. But on top of that, we need to start doing better management to reduce forest fires.

Dover: I am sure you have been out to some of Arkansas’ forests lately and have you seen any mismanagement there or areas that aren’t being kept up in Arkansas?

Westerman: We actually do a pretty good job on our federal forests in Arkansas. There is always room for improvement, but what happens is when we are spending all of the forest service budget to fight wildfires in the West, then that takes money away from doing forest management practices in Arkansas and other southern and eastern states.

During the August recess, I plan to spend a couple of days out on forest service land looking at the forest, looking at the road access issues, and visiting with forest service professionals. But overall, I would say in the U.S. Forest Service System, the forests in Arkansas are managed as good or better than any of them. So hopefully, we can share some of the things we do in Arkansas with other states so that we can make the whole system better.

SUNDAY PREVIEW

On this Sunday’s TV edition of Talk Business & Politics, which airs Sundays at 9:30 a.m. on KATV Channel 7 in Central Arkansas and in Northeast Arkansas on KAIT-NBC, Sundays at 10 a.m., Democratic presumptive Senate nominee Conner Eldridge is our guest. Also, political animals Skip Rutherford and Rex Nelson offer their thoughts on the Republican convention in Cleveland and the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

Watch today’s Talk Business & Politics Daily in the video below.