The Dangers of Playing with Fire
The Bush Administration played with fire last year when it cut the Forest Service’s 2008 fire-fighting budget from $1.6 billion to $1.2 billion. In early August, with nearly 2 hot, dry months still remaining in the agency’s fiscal year, the Forest Service had already overdrawn its fire account.
To deal with the problem, Forest Service Chief Gail Kimball announced that the agency would transfer $400 million from other programs to cover the shortfall. The consequences of this transfer are significant, and the impacts will be felt in many National Forest System and maintenance programs.
In the last ten years, fire suppression has gone from about 15% of the Forest Service’s budget to about 50%. The $1.2 billion they had budgeted for FY ’08 is already nearly half of the annual budget – making it extremely difficult for the Forest Service to manage anything but fire. Early this year, Congress provided supplemental fire funding but clearly it wasn’t enough.
Five primary factors put the agency in this position:
• Increased fire severity and frequency due to climate change (drought, increased insect infestations, etc.);
• Fuels build-up from past fire-suppression;
• Rapid and extensive development in the wildland urban interface – dramatically increasing the amount of private property at risk from wildfire;
• Inability of Congress or the Administration to create a separate, viable and reasonable funding source for wildland fire fighting, and;
• Contracting out firefighting responsibilities adding overhead costs previously not absorbed by the agency.
Fire has become more expensive to control because of these factors, and as a result the Forest Service has lost some of their capacity to use fire as a management tool. But fire is still a critical component of many functioning ecosystems, whether we’ve built houses in them or not, and the agency needs to find a way to keep this tool in its toolbox.
Fire isn’t the only management problem the agency is facing, but with constant budget shortfalls, and increasing firefighting costs, it is eating up the funding needed for other resource issues. Roads for example, cause significant short and long-term impacts to forest ecosystems. More than half a million roads cut through national forests, bleeding sediments into drinking water supplies, fragmenting wildlife and aquatic habitat, spreading invasive pests and pathogens, and damaging fisheries. Increasingly severe and frequent pacific storms cause tens of millions of dollars worth of damage nearly every year, much of that from massive road failures.
In 2007, Wildlands CPR and the Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative worked with Congress, the Forest Service and others to promote a new funding mechanism for dealing with old, failing, expensive and ecologically-damaging forest roads. This resulted in the 2007 Omnibus Appropriations bill including $39.4 million for the new Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative (LRRI). The LRRI provided funding to every region of the Forest Service to fix ailing forest roads by upgrading culverts (to restore fish passage) or performing critical maintenance. It also provided long overdue and much needed funding for restoring watersheds by removing unneeded forest roads. But $40 million is just a drop in the bucket – the Forest Service has a road maintenance backlog of approximately $10 billion.
Now even this limited funding is in jeopardy. The LRRI funds are just one of numerous accounts being raided to cover the fire-fighting shortfall. Some regions estimate that the initial $400 million transfer will take approximately half of the LRRI funds allocated to their region. But many LRRI projects had matching funds, so the agency risks losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in matching funds from public and private partners.
The Forest Service cannot manage their lands effectively when forced to operate in this fashion. They cannot commit to restoration, mitigation or even planning projects when they don’t know if funding will be available for the duration of the year. They cannot commit to contractors, jeopardizing local jobs. They cannot commit to partners who bring matching funds to the table to do important work. Fire is not the only ecological or economic challenge the Forest Service is facing. If the agency doesn’t fix its crumbling road system, starting with the reclamation of unneeded roads, we will end up with severely damaged fisheries, degraded drinking water, and the loss of access to public lands from road failures.
In previous years, Congress has paid the Forest Service back for money it had to borrow to fight fires but time is running out on this congress and it looks bleak for another supplemental appropriation to reimburse the Forest Service for this year’s fire transfers. Earlier this year legislation was introduced in the House to create separate fire-fighting accounts, so the agency could have a reliable budget. The Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act (FLAME Act) (H.R. 5541), though far from perfect, could ease the burden if it passed. So would zoning regulations to prevent more exurban growth; prescribed fire to reduce fuel loading; investment in community “fire-proofing” in the wildland urban interface; thinning in the interface; and numerous other approaches. Instead nearly all of the money is being poured into suppression.
The Forest Service has a lot more “fires” to put out than those that actually involve heat and flame. Unstable, under-maintained roads are like rotting foundations waiting to collapse when the next big storm comes through. Thousands of miles already have, and thousands more will. And the damage can be more costly than that caused by fires. If we can provide more than $1 billion/year for fire-fighting, then it seems we could also provide at least $500 million/year for the Legacy Roads Initiative to begin erasing the $10 billion road maintenance/management backlog. But without a rational mechanism to fund comprehensive fire management (including prescribed fire), and full funding for other resource management needs, the Forest Service might as well just change its name to the Fire Service.
To deal with the problem, Forest Service Chief Gail Kimball announced that the agency would transfer $400 million from other programs to cover the shortfall. The consequences of this transfer are significant, and the impacts will be felt in many National Forest System and maintenance programs.
In the last ten years, fire suppression has gone from about 15% of the Forest Service’s budget to about 50%. The $1.2 billion they had budgeted for FY ’08 is already nearly half of the annual budget – making it extremely difficult for the Forest Service to manage anything but fire. Early this year, Congress provided supplemental fire funding but clearly it wasn’t enough.
Five primary factors put the agency in this position:
• Increased fire severity and frequency due to climate change (drought, increased insect infestations, etc.);
• Fuels build-up from past fire-suppression;
• Rapid and extensive development in the wildland urban interface – dramatically increasing the amount of private property at risk from wildfire;
• Inability of Congress or the Administration to create a separate, viable and reasonable funding source for wildland fire fighting, and;
• Contracting out firefighting responsibilities adding overhead costs previously not absorbed by the agency.
Fire has become more expensive to control because of these factors, and as a result the Forest Service has lost some of their capacity to use fire as a management tool. But fire is still a critical component of many functioning ecosystems, whether we’ve built houses in them or not, and the agency needs to find a way to keep this tool in its toolbox.
Fire isn’t the only management problem the agency is facing, but with constant budget shortfalls, and increasing firefighting costs, it is eating up the funding needed for other resource issues. Roads for example, cause significant short and long-term impacts to forest ecosystems. More than half a million roads cut through national forests, bleeding sediments into drinking water supplies, fragmenting wildlife and aquatic habitat, spreading invasive pests and pathogens, and damaging fisheries. Increasingly severe and frequent pacific storms cause tens of millions of dollars worth of damage nearly every year, much of that from massive road failures.
In 2007, Wildlands CPR and the Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative worked with Congress, the Forest Service and others to promote a new funding mechanism for dealing with old, failing, expensive and ecologically-damaging forest roads. This resulted in the 2007 Omnibus Appropriations bill including $39.4 million for the new Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative (LRRI). The LRRI provided funding to every region of the Forest Service to fix ailing forest roads by upgrading culverts (to restore fish passage) or performing critical maintenance. It also provided long overdue and much needed funding for restoring watersheds by removing unneeded forest roads. But $40 million is just a drop in the bucket – the Forest Service has a road maintenance backlog of approximately $10 billion.
Now even this limited funding is in jeopardy. The LRRI funds are just one of numerous accounts being raided to cover the fire-fighting shortfall. Some regions estimate that the initial $400 million transfer will take approximately half of the LRRI funds allocated to their region. But many LRRI projects had matching funds, so the agency risks losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in matching funds from public and private partners.
The Forest Service cannot manage their lands effectively when forced to operate in this fashion. They cannot commit to restoration, mitigation or even planning projects when they don’t know if funding will be available for the duration of the year. They cannot commit to contractors, jeopardizing local jobs. They cannot commit to partners who bring matching funds to the table to do important work. Fire is not the only ecological or economic challenge the Forest Service is facing. If the agency doesn’t fix its crumbling road system, starting with the reclamation of unneeded roads, we will end up with severely damaged fisheries, degraded drinking water, and the loss of access to public lands from road failures.
In previous years, Congress has paid the Forest Service back for money it had to borrow to fight fires but time is running out on this congress and it looks bleak for another supplemental appropriation to reimburse the Forest Service for this year’s fire transfers. Earlier this year legislation was introduced in the House to create separate fire-fighting accounts, so the agency could have a reliable budget. The Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act (FLAME Act) (H.R. 5541), though far from perfect, could ease the burden if it passed. So would zoning regulations to prevent more exurban growth; prescribed fire to reduce fuel loading; investment in community “fire-proofing” in the wildland urban interface; thinning in the interface; and numerous other approaches. Instead nearly all of the money is being poured into suppression.
The Forest Service has a lot more “fires” to put out than those that actually involve heat and flame. Unstable, under-maintained roads are like rotting foundations waiting to collapse when the next big storm comes through. Thousands of miles already have, and thousands more will. And the damage can be more costly than that caused by fires. If we can provide more than $1 billion/year for fire-fighting, then it seems we could also provide at least $500 million/year for the Legacy Roads Initiative to begin erasing the $10 billion road maintenance/management backlog. But without a rational mechanism to fund comprehensive fire management (including prescribed fire), and full funding for other resource management needs, the Forest Service might as well just change its name to the Fire Service.
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