Senators seek more wildland fire funding
|
|
June 30, 2013 |
In the midst of a rapidly intensifying fire
season, four U.S. senators on Friday called on
the administration to produce a plan for
budgeting for wildfires and increasing funding
for fire prevention.
For years, the U.S. Forest Service has cut
prevention efforts to pay for spiraling
fire-fight costs – a strategy that ultimately
increases the size of fires, and the cost of
fighting them.
In a letter to the White House Office of
Management and Budget, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture and the Department of the Interior,
Senators Jim Risch, R-Idaho, Ron Wyden, D-Ore.,
Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Mark Udall,
D-Colo., asked the administration to create an
action plan to fully fund prevention efforts
such as hazardous fuels reduction, in addition
to fire suppression efforts
Currently, the administration takes funds from
other non-fire programs to pay for fire
suppression costs – a practice called fire
borrowing.
The government has cut back on programs to
reduce fire risks to communities.
The U.S. Forest Service treated 1.87 million
acres of those lands in 2012, but expects to
treat only 685,000 acres next year.
“Our understanding is that these cuts were based
on OMB’s continued skepticism about the efficacy
of hazardous fuels treatments. We
whole-heartedly disagree with OMB on this
point,” the senators wrote. “When the budgeted
amount is insufficient, the agency continues to
suppress fires by reallocating funds from other
non-fire programs. This approach to paying for
firefighting is nonsensical and further
increases wildland fire costs.”
At the same time, wildfires continue to spread
and their costs steadily rise. Across the
country, 65 million acres of national forest —
an area bigger than Oregon – are at a high risk
for fires, according to a Forest Service report
issued last year. In the last ten years, fire
suppression costs have increased from 13 percent
of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget to 40
percent last year.
In addition, the senators urged the
administration to implement the Federal Land
Assistance, Management and Enhancement (FLAME)
Act as Congress intended, which was enacted in
2009 to provide additional suppression funding
for emergency wildfires above and beyond the
10-year rolling average.
The bill was intended to end the practice of
raiding non-fire accounts – including fire
prevention programs – to pay for fire
suppression when the agency runs over its
firefighting budget. The FLAME Act created a
reserve fund for years when costs exceeded the
budget, but the administration has failed to
enact the law as Congress intended and has
continued to disrupt prevention efforts by
borrowing from non-fire accounts.
“Despite Congressional intent, OMB has forced
the agencies to implement the FLAME Act in a
manner that makes it ineffective: instead of
funding the FLAME account in addition to the
10-year average cost of suppression, the account
is funded as part of the 10-year average cost of
suppression,” the senators further wrote.
In the early weeks of this fire season, massive
wildfires have already burned more than one
million acres and destroyed hundreds of homes in
Colorado, California, Arizona and New Mexico. |
|
Questions or comments about this
article?
Click here to e-mail! |
|
|
|
|
