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Ritter Signs Important Pine Beetle Bills

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May 28, 2008 8:58 pm US/Mountain

Ritter Signs Important Pine Beetle Bills

Reporting
Andrea Lopez
SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. (CBS4) ― More than a million acres of Colorado's lodge pole pines are either dead or dying from the mountain pine beetle. Several new bills signed into law Wednesday will help reduce the fire threat from all the dead timber.

Gov. Bill Ritter picked a struggling forest as the place to sign six bills into law.

"We all know how important Colorado's forests are to this state," Ritter said. "This epidemic has decimated more than 1.5 million acres of mature lodge pole pines."

"In 2007 it was detected that there were 500,000 new infested acres," Jan Hackett with the Colorado State Forest Service said.

People and the Forest Service can cut down dead and dying trees around communities, homes and waterways to protect them from fire.

"I believe that these bills are a step in the right direction to make our community safer," Rep. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, said.

The bills will provide grant money to communities that need to do logging projects. It gives land owners the ability to write off wildfire mitigation costs on their taxes. Businesses that make use of the beetle-infested wood are now eligible for tax breaks. Two bills give the public ways to donate money for pine beetle projects. And water managers are given opportunities, through bonds, to fund water protection projects.

"We've all worked really well together," Gibbs said. "It's just been a real team effort."

Even thought the beetle can't be stopped, the hope is to mitigate some of the damage and turn some of the negatives into positives.

"So much of what we are doing here today is to just to try to reinforce (that the) policy makers really do understand what we need to do to protect our mountains, and to do all we can to protect our landscape and forests," Ritter said.

The pine beetle epidemic is far from over. Experts predict within the next five years all of Colorado's lodge poles will be wiped out.

(© MMIX CBS Television Stations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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