Tag: Wildfire

Lawmakers are increasingly banking on bugs, providing tax incentives to businesses dealing with the Colorado’s massive mountain pine beetle outbreak and at the same time trying to mitigate the epidemic’s potentially devastating economic impacts.

FEMA coughed up more than $1.6 million in federal disaster relief funds Thursday to compensate the Colorado State Forest Service for fighting the 13,000-acre Malo Vega Fire in Costilla County in June 2007.

The biggest no-brainer piece of legislation the state’s 67th General Assembly will like see this session, the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (or SB 1), easily passed out of the House on Wednesday, even as its co-sponsor, Rep. Christine Scanlan (D-Dillon) headed to Washington seeking federal funds to combat the beetle-kill epidemic.

State House Majority Whip Christine Scanlan, D-Dillon, is whipping up a little beetle-mania this week in Washington, ratcheting up the rhetoric in the war for more money to battle the bug that won the West.

Even as winter weather rolled back into Colorado Thursday and squelched three wildfires that Tuesday scorched thousands of acres, killed three firefighters and destroyed...