Wildfire Season: Senators Look to Fix How Fighting Fires is Funded

For years, Senator Ron Wyden - Democrat from Oregon - has been working with his Republican colleagues from Idaho, Jim Frisch and Mike Crapo have been working to fix what they call a very broken system of how this country pays to fight wildfires.

The three announced Monday that they may have finally had a breakthrough in getting their Senate colleagues to pay attention.

"We have pointed out the cost to the rural west and to America for this broken dysfuncitonal mess of a budget which is how we fight fires in America today," Wyden said.

The current system - that has resulted in one percent of the nation's wildlifres accounting for 30 percent of the nation's firefighting costs - involves so-called "fire-borrowing" where agencies such as Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service are forced to gut their fire prevention budgets to pay for fighting fires as they break out.

"What happens is as a result of shorting prevention, it then gets hot and dry - we have lightning strikes in our part of the world - all of a sudden you have an inferno on your hands," Wyden said.

Under the plan pushed by the three senators, firefighting costs would come from the same emergency funds that are used to pay for disasters such as earthquakes, tornados, and flooding.

"We fight these fires anyway," Crapo said. "And if we can fight the fires more effectively, without robbing our active management budget in the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, then we can … reduce the number and extent of the catastrophic fires. That's the whole approach there."

While the senators have been pushing this approach for several years, it is only recently that they have started to receive support from their colleagues including Senator Charles Schumer from New York.

"Now if you're in Boise or rural Oregon, you'd say, 'Why in the world would a United States senator who comes from Brooklyn, N.Y. be interested in this?'" Wyden said. "Well, wha'’s happened is the Forest Service budget is so discombobulated as a result of all this borrowing and moving money here and there, Senator Schumer can't get the funds for some of the work he needs to deal with the ash beetle in upstate New York, and it’s hurting the baseball bat industry."

The senators say that a budget conference to discuss an energy bill is planned for September and that's where the change could happen.

"We’ve got some new allies," Wyden said. "They don't want the Forest Service to become the Fire Service, and that’s where we're headed at this point."

Photo Oregon Department of Forestry