Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I could go on at length on how important our fire system is, and certainly our resources and personnel. I would certainly like to do so, but unfortunately, time doesn’t avail itself to the amount of things that we should be talking how great they are. I will say that without them, we would have seen such a horrendous result of this summer, and I am very thankful they have been on the line providing the services that they do.

The government does provide the resources necessary to do this job, and it’s our job to support the government where necessary and we feel it makes sense. This is an interesting one because our government is looking at the aircraft referred to as the 802s style of aircraft and replacing our present fleet, which is referred to as the 215. It’s funny when you think about it, that the new system will come in but does the old system become completely obsolete. There may be a value to it if we market it and sell it somewhere. But I often wonder what the results, thinking about that, is what value does it present us and what value have we taken away from the potential opportunity of using these?

I don’t know, really, if this is from an accounting exercise, certainly not experience. None of us in this room, besides the experts at the witness table that is, have this level of detail or experience on how to deal with these things, both financially and operationally.

One of the challenges I have here is the worry of thinking, would we be selling an asset of ours for

pennies on the dollar, out the door just to get rid of them and asking ourselves, are we ready for the next fire season or the next fire season thereafter. So I would caution us to get rid of them too. I think really what this motion is doing is suggesting, let’s keep them in our fleet, although it doesn’t have a time frame by saying keeping them in our fleet three, five, 10 years, but what it does is it suggests that we keep them in our fleet to be prepared.

I’m happy to support the motion at this time, and I would prefer that we keep them in our fleet, keep them accessible to us. And you know what? There may be a way to work them into our firefighting system.

I’d really like to see an evaluation done maybe after two fire seasons. If they become a financial problem, and I don’t want to use the word boondoggle, because that always brings a bit of a negative aspect, but if they end up being just a financial resource, we spend our money, that just isn’t played out, and the affordability factor, I mean, those results would drive the analysis, and I wouldn’t want to prejudice them coming in until that result is done. My encouragement would be, let’s keep them as an operational asset for probably a couple years and do an assessment on that and find out where they were.

It’s funny. We only have so many planes now and we fought the fires that we fought. What would it have been like if we had twice the amount of infrastructure fighting the same fire? Would we have fought it twice as fast? I don’t know. I mean, mathematically, fire doesn’t burn that way, I know. Fire experts will tell you how it burns, and how it continues to grow at different paces. Could we have stopped it sooner than later? I don’t know, but I would hope that maybe if we kept these a couple years, saw the results and were able to sort of chart and plan and predict, maybe, in the future, I mean, this might be the way to go.

The last thing I’ll say is, although we don’t have the money to go beyond eight 802s, after this fire season one may wonder is eight enough. Financially, we are not in any position to keep pursuing more than eight, but by the same token, keeping them, an asset we already own, a cache of equipment, stores of supplies and tools and everything that suits them, including parts, it would be a shameful waste to get rid of them, like I said, at pennies on the dollar when this could be a territorial resource that we could evaluate after a couple of years to find out if it really made sense.

We have to have the vision of this and this is what Legislatures do, is we’re supposed to have the vision of seeing problems ahead of us and trying to figure out ways to deal with them. I’m hopeful that this could be a resource that puts people to work and protects Northerners where it matters most.