42 



Mr. Robertson. Well, the K-V is that way. We do include it in 

 our budget to give a full description in our budget, but it comes 

 back direct and does not need to be appropriated. 



Mr. Vento. What is the health of that K-V fund now with the 

 curtailment of harvest in this area? Region VI is a major contribu- 

 tor to the funds, so it is losing some of its size. Is that correct? 



Mr. Robertson. That is correct. It is going down significantly in 

 Region VI, and it will continue to go down. 



Mr. Vento. It isn't due to the budgetary borrowing for fire funds 

 at this particular time. In recent yesirs, whatever else we did, I 

 think we finally got the fire budget straightened out. Is that cor- 

 rect? 



Mr. Robertson. You had it straightened out, but we still have 



to deal with last year. 



Mr. Vento. Well, that is a typical problem. 



Mr. Robertson. So we still have about a $294 million debt to 

 pay off. 



Mr. Vento. How about BLM? How is our fire f\ind there? We are 

 not borrowing from land and water any more. 



Mr. Penfold. Well, we don't have a K-V fund. 



Mr. Vento. No, I know that. So you borrow from land and water 

 and from other accounts. We tried to straighten that out. What is 

 the status of the fire fund over there? Do you know, or not? 



Mr. Penfold. I don't. I guess I can't answer the question. Fun- 

 damentally, though, we are not using the fire fund to plant trees. 

 We do some emergency rehabilitation work, such as emergency 

 water drainage and erosion control, but tree planting is done 

 through other funds. 



Mr. Vento. Well, I could ask a few more questions, but we have 

 got other witnesses. This is an interesting dialogue, Mr. Penfold. 

 Chief Robertson has talked about the ecological management ap- 

 proach that is being articulated in the Forest Service and recog- 

 nizes this. How would you respond to that? 



Mr. Penfold. I appreciate a chance to respond to that question, 

 Mr. Chairman. We have been in good coordination with the Forest 

 Service on ecosystem management. We are taking a slightly dif- 

 ferent tack on how to get it implemented into our agencies, but the 

 concepts are the same. We are making good progress. 



Last year, after a lot of consultation with our various publics, we 

 published a document called "Our Growing Legacy." It was a more 

 narrowly focused document on forests, but it recognized that we 

 needed to take ecological approaches to determining what kinds of 

 products should be coming off of those forests that the BLM man- 

 ages. That is going to be expanded over this next year with our 

 new director in a policy statement such as the chief has already 

 signed for the U.S. Forest Service. So we think we are moving 

 quite aggressively in this. 



Obviously, there is a lot that we all have to learn about how to 

 go about doing this. We see it very much as a mix of taking care 

 of the ecological resources on the public lands, being concerned 

 with working with the different partners who manage lands in the 

 landscape such as the Forest Service and the private sector we 

 need to coordinate with, thinking a lot about the social economic 



