Outside view: Subsidized lunacy
The following editorial appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Friday.
Surely Americans would still be building homes next to pretty little rivers if only they could get insurance – and count on the federal government to pile up sandbags when the water rose.
Only fools still build in floodplains. But in the fire-prone fringe of wild forestlands, a rough equivalent, housing starts are booming. Appetites for woodsy living appear insatiable, and undimmed by a string of bad fire years.
Why not? Should a fire break out near your sylvan sanctum, government firefighting agencies, usually led by the U.S. Forest Service, will respond with quasimilitary might. You won’t see a bill for their services. And if your place burns down, the insurance money will build you another – in a new location, unscarred by flames.
This is subsidized lunacy, and its stunning impact on U.S. taxpayers is laid out in a recent audit report from the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, parent agency of the Forest Service. Though sharply worded, it refrains from voicing a conclusion obvious to any reader:
Federal firefighting efforts are controlled, in effect, by homeowners who build where they shouldn’t, and by local officials who won’t enforce reasonable zoning measures.
Officially, the Forest Service is under a 1995 congressional directive allowing wildland fire “as nearly possible, to function in its natural ecological role to reduce hazardous fuels in the wildlands.” Protecting homes is to be primarily a state and local responsibility, with federal help determined by “the relative values to be protected and the costs of protection.”
In practice, though, the Forest Service fights nearly all fires that threaten homes and other buildings – even on nonfederal forestlands. Figures compiled by the National Interagency Fire Center show that only about 2 percent of wildland fires are allowed to burn nowadays; last year, the figure was 1.7 percent. Analyzing Forest Service firefighting in 2003 and 2004, the audit determined that 87 percent of the time, protecting private property was the reason.
And the price for U.S. taxpayers? Last year it ran to $1.5 billion just for the Forest Service, with other federal agencies spending hundreds of millions more; its annual average has been running $900 million of late. Most of it goes to fight fires in the West, where landowners prefer the Forest Service’s turn-of-the-20th-century practice of putting out every fire as fast as possible. Perversely, some argue that because its 90 years of suppression have made the forests more flammable, the Forest Service owes it to them to save their houses. …
Congress may need to revise its 1995 directive; certainly it must insist that the Forest Service comply. Better yet, it ought to find a way of moving the insurance industry to stop underwriting homes in these wildland fire zones, just as it did with floodplains.