Congress is no closer to agreeing on a plan to try to reduce the risk of wildfires and fix a funding problem that challenges the federal response, more than a week after damaging fires in Southern California worsened a record wildfire season.
Western lawmakers for months have pushed for Congress to address funding and management challenges at the U.S. Forest Service, as the government struggles to respond to the most expensive year ever for fighting wildfires.
But as fires rage across the West, Congress has disagreed over how to help fund wildfire response and impose forest management changes that could prevent fires from starting.
“Everyone thought the fire season was over this year, but obviously that’s not the case in Southern California,” Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., told the Washington Examiner. “If this doesn’t highlight the need for management reform, I don’t know what would.”
The House last month approved Westerman’s bill, the Resilient Federal Forests Act, which contains several changes intended to make fires less explosive.
The legislation would allow the Forest Service to thin the trees in forests up to 30,000 acres using a shorter environmental review process under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The Forest Service then could more quickly pursue what are known as “forest management projects,” in which the agency removes dead or dying timber and sells it to mills, and then can use the proceeds to care for the forests and make them more resilient to wildfires.
But several Senate Democrats who have their own proposals, such as Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., oppose Westerman’s bill, arguing his approach weakens environmental reviews too much and encourages litigation against the Forest Service.
“The fastest way to get additional forest management underway is to pass a full, bipartisan fire funding fix, which will free up consistent funding for forest management to prevent catastrophic forest fires,” said Samantha Offerdahl, a spokeswoman for Wyden. “He stands ready to work with his colleagues on forest management changes they may want to see as soon as that full fire funding fix is agreed to.”
The Senate has yet to consider a bill on the floor.
The debate comes as the largest of several wildfires in Southern California has destroyed 800 structures and damaged or threatened more than 18,000 others. That follows a series of wildfires in October that killed more than 40 people in Northern California, the state’s deadliest wildfire event on record.
The fires have compounded funding woes at the Forest Service, which has had to borrow from other accounts because its firefighting funding runs out.
While the vast majority of the October fires in Northern California occurred on private land, federal Forest Service land was affected by the more recent fires of last week.
As costs have risen, Congress for years has tried to fix the funding mechanism for fighting forest fires but has failed to find consensus. This year fire-suppression costs have exceeded $2 billion.
The problem is that under current law, forest fires are not treated the same as other natural disasters such as hurricanes.
That forces the Forest Service to take money from accounts dedicated to preventative maintenance, such as clearing underbrush.
Westerman, and Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, met this week with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, to discuss forest management options.
But Westerman says he is not aware of any “substantive” negotiations occurring between the House and Senate to bridge a solution.
There has been some action in the Senate. A bipartisan group of Western senators introduced a bill in October that is intended to be a compromise between competing factions in Congress.
The bill would create a pilot program to stop wildfires in the ponderosa pines, which are a vulnerable species of tree prevalant in the West.
It also would streamline the environmental review process to allow for forest managers to more quickly thin the pine trees, at a more limited scale than Westerman’s bill permits.
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, meanwhile, has introduced a bill that works similarly to Westerman’s plan.
Katie Schoettler, a spokeswoman for Bishop and the Natural Resources Committee, says her boss is open to compromise.
“The Westerman bill is the only comprehensive forest management bill on the table,” she told the Washington Examiner. “It’s enactment is a priority to prevent these catastrophic fires from happening. We understand a compromise with the Senate will be necessary to get forestry reforms signed into law. But any compromise will have to include provisions from Westerman’s bill.”
Westerman, however, suggested he was less willing to bend.
“I am all for negotiating, but we want to keep in the real part of my bill that allows for management to happen,” Westerman said. “We can’t have fluff management-in-name-only kind of stuff. It has to be real reform that allows the Forest Service to do their job. We have to have a full frontal assault if we want to turn the tide.”
