geissler: yes, sir. the fire borrowing issue was actually helped tremendously by some legislation that occurred a couple years ago. really, the emphasis right now needs to be to take that -- those dollars and really force them onto the ground and making sure they are being put into the highest priority areas that we have. a lot of times when we're doing forest management, i call them random acts of conservation. where a lot of it is kind of spread across the landscape and prioritizing the funds, making sure they get to the ground is something we should all emphasize and work harder on. mr. bera: ok. great. we were able to pass that legislation in a bipartisan way. i think this is another area where we can work together as democrats and republicans, you know, to really make sure we're actively managing our forests, mitigating some of these fires. mr. litzenberg, let me ask you a question. four, five years ago, i had two of my local fire chiefs who happened to be up in washington, d.c. visiting. they start

george geissler. he's a forester, it's deputy supervisor for wildfire and forest health, and having previously served in oklahoma. he has 30 years of experience, in natural resources and wild land fires, and fire management and six years of experience in structural firefighting as a volunteer in idaho and new mexico. he is a member of the society of american foresters, since 1987. and he is a certified force here. he joined the oklahoma foresee forestry service in the -- . before being named a state forester, he served to function all forest management activities, by the agency. and our fourth and final witness, is chief eric -- who has retired from his position, as far chief of santa fe new mexico. he's had a majority of his career, in the santa fe fire department, completing his time as fire chief and city manager, before returning to the county where his career began. he has 25 years of service, his work for new mexico state forestry, and is part of multiple incident management teams, and for many

geissler. one area i've worked on over the years is we have allocated resources to better forestry et cetera, but for years we would do this thing called fire borrowing where we would take those resources and then we'd actually send them to fight the fires. i know we've tried to invest the issue of fire borrowing. i suspect we could do more on the forestry management site to mitigate some of these forest fires. is that correct? >> yes, sir. the fire borrowing issue was actually helped tremendously by some legislation that occurred a couple of years ago, really the emphasis right now needs to be to take that -- those dollars and really force them onto the ground and making sure that they are being put into the highest priority areas that we have. a lot of times when we're doing forest management, i call them random acts of conservation where a lot of it is kind of spread across the landscape. in prioritizing the funds, making sure that they get to the ground is something that we should all empha

geissler, would you care to add to that?yes, and chief litzenberg really hit the nail on the head. it's the availability and the utilization of all of this data that is being created and making sure that we have the ability to share it across the various jurisdictions. and it has happened in some places. i can give you an example within my own state where we utilize data from federal, state and local who we have come together and are sharing it across jurisdictional boundaries to develop a forest health strategy for our state. prioritizing all of the landscapes across all jurisdictions and that is in collaboration with the u.s. forest service, state agencies and locals and it ties back to our forest health management and then we also have used it on our wildfire strategy we are building out. but it takes a lot of interagency discussions and it takes an environment where there's a shared mission on how we need to address or what the end goal should be. and that, again, much like eric said, is a lot of folks or organizations a