Congress reached a long-sought deal Wednesday night to fix chronic problems in funding wildfire response and prevention, after the government struggled last year to respond to the most expensive year ever for the fires.
“Pacific Northwest lawmakers have worked together to force Congress to finally address the persistent shortfalls in our nation’s wildland firefighting budgets,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who sponsored the wildfire provision that was included as part of a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill released Wednesday night.
“This puts an end to fire-borrowing and is a start to giving the Forest Service the predictable resources they need to reduce hazardous fuels. This funding boost will allow the Forest Service to prioritize work in areas closest to communities, in order to save lives and reduce the risk of property damage, while still protecting essential public lands and existing environmental laws.”
The deal comes after catastrophic wildfires hit the West Coast last year, including a series of fires in Northern California in October that killed more than 40 people. It was the deadliest fire in the state’s history.
The severe year for wildfires came after more than 10 million acres burned in 2015, what had been the worst fire season in decades.
But the more recent fires are different, and urgent, because fires are increasingly burning close to homes and people as the West becomes more populated.
The fires have compounded funding woes at the Forest Service, which has had to borrow from other accounts because its firefighting funding runs out, a practice known as “fire borrowing.”
As costs have risen, Congress for years has tried to fix the funding mechanism for fighting forest fires but has failed to find consensus. Last year fire-suppression costs exceeded $2 billion.
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.
In 1995, the Forest Service, which is the largest agency that responds to wildfires, spent about one-sixth of its budget on wildfires. Today, it regularly spends more than half of its $5 billion annual budget on firefighting
Republicans and Democrats have agreed about wanting to address the funding issue, but have disagreed over whether and how to pair that with forest management reforms that could prevent fires from starting.
The new wildfire package included in the 2018 spending bill ends the Forest Service practice of fire-borrowing by establishing a contingency account for use in bad fire years, funded with more than $2 billion a year through 2027.
It includes more than $100 million for fire prevention projects and recreation programs.
The bill also allows utilities to partner with the Forest Service to prevent trees from touching power lines and starting fires.
And it expands the ability of states to partner with the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to accomplish fuels reduction and restoration projects, Cantwell said.
These “forest management projects” allow the agency to remove dead or dying timber and sell it to mills. The Forest Service then could use the proceeds to care for the forests and make them more resilient to wildfires.
