A bill allowing wildfires to be declared natural disasters and reforming the U.S. Forest Service’s management practices cleared a Senate committee Tuesday.
The Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee approved the Emergency Wildfire and Forest Management Act by an 11-9 vote. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., and passed the House last summer.
The bill would put an end to the practice known as “fire borrowing,” or taking money from non-fire suppression portions of the Forest Service’s budget to fight wildfires. It also would provide additional tools for the Forest Service to address “fundamental and systemic problems contributing to the degradation of our public lands,” said committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.
“Congress needs to add wildfire funding, and federal land managers need the ability to manage forests and landscapes to be more resilient to devastating wildfires,” he said.
The Obama administration issued a statement opposing the bill when it passed the House last year. The administration says more funding would be needed and the bill contains provisions that could harm the environment.
According to Tuesday’s report from the Forest Service, 101 wildfires are burning in the U.S. About 4.7 million acres have burned this year.
During Tuesday’s hearing, many senators talked about the situation in their home states and noted an added urgency to get legislation through Congress this session to help the Forest Service deal with the fires.
Last year, more than 10 million acres burned, and fighting the wildfires took up more than half of the Forest Service’s budget. That spending hurt the agency’s ability to take up other projects related to recreation and other forest use.
The bill would make money from the Disaster Relief Fund available to help fight fires, shrink the amount of analysis the Forest Service must do before approving forest management projects that reduce the amount of wood available for wildfires to burn, and authorize a number of exceptions to the National Environmental Policy Act for the Forest Service to take action before and after a wildfire.
Those exceptions concerned Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the top Democrat on the committee. She said the bill has too many provisions that allow the Forest Service to take shortcuts.
She added that the bill isn’t comprehensive in tackling how much money the Forest Service has to fight wildfires. The agency’s budget has eroded in recent years and more money needs to be spent, she said.
“This is not a comprehensive fix to the budget issues, which are extremely real and we have bipartisan support to do that with other legislation,” she said.
While other Democrats agreed with Stabenow’s assessment, enough Republicans supported the bill to override their votes, though many expressed concerns of their own.
Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said he wasn’t thrilled with how the bill funds wildfire suppression. The bill would fully fund the 10-year average of wildfire suppression funding and would make additional funds available through the Disaster Relief Fund.
He said that could end up hurting the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“What I’m particularly concerned about is the cap doesn’t specify or limit the amount of funding that can be transferred [to the Forest Service],” he said.
“The result is … we could have a lack of funds in the Disaster Relief Fund. We need to have a mechanism to address that.”
