Western senators push bill to fix how forest firefighting is funded

BOISE – With wildfires raging along with the costs to fight them, a group of Western senators on Wednesday touted a solution for paying firefighting bills.

The U.S. Forest Service has seen a stunning shift in its operations and priorities, with the growing cost of fighting wildfires eating up much of the agency’s budget and “crippling” its ability to do anything else, according to a Forest Service report released last week.

Idaho Republican Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, along with Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, visited the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise on Wednesday to hear the latest, troubling news about this year’s difficult fire season. The trio also spoke for legislation Crapo and Wyden have introduced in Congress to change how wildfire suppression is funded.

“This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue that those of us who live out west have wrestled with for a long, long time,” Risch said. “The cost of these can really wreak havoc on the budget in a given year.”

Under the bill, once firefighting costs in any year exceed 70 percent of the 10-year average, they’d be covered from a wildfire disaster account separate from the Forest Service and Interior budgets. That account would tap the same funding sources FEMA uses for hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters.

The idea is to eliminate “fire borrowing,” where agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have to dip into funds for all their other programs when firefighting costs exceed budgeted levels. That includes money earmarked for programs aimed at preventing future fires. The result is more and worse fires, and ever-climbing costs.

“In just 10 years, two out of every three dollars the Forest Service gets from Congress as part of its appropriated budget will be spent on fire programs,” says the new report. In 1995, just 16 percent of the agency’s budget went to firefighting. The shift, the report says, is “crippling the agency’s ability to conserve the nation’s forests and grasslands and to provide the multiple uses and values for which the agency was created.”

Will Whelan of the Nature Conservancy, who joined the three senators to tout the legislation, said that means over time some $700 million will be shifted from programs supporting recreation, wildlife and water quality to fire suppression.

Whelan said no other federal agencies are required to bear the costs of natural disasters from their regular operating budgets.

Wyden said he’s hoping to push hard for the bill when Congress reconvenes in September. In the closing days before the August congressional recess, 11 Western senators submitted a statement to the Congressional Record pledging strong support for the bill.

Crapo noted that both the White House and the Congressional Budget Office have determined that the bill wouldn’t increase federal spending.

“We’re going to have to fight these fires anyway,” Crapo said. “What our bill allows us to do is to utilize the emergency funding that Congress already has and has appropriated, to fight those emergency disaster fires.”

The bill, the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, has 16 Senate co-sponsors from both parties and support from 250 organizations; an identical version in the House, sponsored by Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, has 124 co-sponsors from both parties, including lead co-sponsor Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore.