The Post editorial: Colorado’s senators were able to help secure a fix to how the U.S. Forest Service pays for fighting wildfires.

Thanks to the work of Colorado’s senators, the health of our forests and services on public lands may get back on track after years of underfunding.

U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner were able to help secure in the $1.3 trillion budget deal what has proven elusive for decades: a fix to how the U.S. Forest Service pays for fighting wildfires.

Sadly, a similar bipartisan effort by Gardner, a Republican, and Bennet, a Democrat, to protect the recreational marijuana industry from a threatened federal crackdown did not make it into the final package.

The plan would have prohibited the U.S. Department of Justice from spending money to pursue legal charges stemming from the federal prohibitions on selling the drug in states that have made marijuana legal. Protections previously offered to the medical marijuana industry remain in place.

But it’s a major victory for the West that within the 2,232-page bill released Wednesday night are provisions to help the Forest Service better manage its land.

Since at least 2008 this board has advocated for a change that would allow the Forest Service to put more of its budget toward fire mitigation and forest health efforts to reduce the intensity and size of fires before they strike. Under previous law the agency was forced to spend its operating budget on fire suppression efforts. As fires have worsened over the years, the cost of fighting fires consumed more and more of the agency’s budget, crippling the ability for forest management efforts.

When the omnibus budget bill passes, so too will provisions that allow the Forest Service to budget for wildfires at the amount currently required, freezing in place a number that for years had been escalating. Additionally, Congress will begin funding any additional firefighting costs above the budgeted amount using emergency disaster dollars.

Fighting wildfires accounted for 16 percent of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget in 1995. Last year the agency spent more than $2 billion fighting fires, which accounted for 56 percent of the agency’s budget.

The proposal to spare the Forest Service’s budget by freezing spending on fires and finding another source for overages has long had bipartisan support, but it’s been trapped in limbo between the logging industry, which wanted provisions that make it easier to get permits to operate on federal lands, and the environmental community, which opposed such measures.

The final compromise does include some provisions that will hopefully expedite logging for forest health and fire suppression in limited areas without jeopardizing environmental protections. That is one small example of how this budget includes far too much policy in a document that should be dedicated to questions of spending. It also includes the creation of a fire risk assessment mapping tool that will help the Forest Service prioritize mitigation efforts and other endeavors.

Despite the inevitability of a trillion-dollar spending package being laden with pork and pet projects, we nonetheless lament that any effort to keep domestic and military spending in check has been abandoned. And never mind that this is a spending package for the fiscal year that started in October and has hobbled along with stop-gap resolutions until now.

Such a sad state is Congress in that we are actually grateful for this omnibus bill with all of its flaws. The members of The Denver Post’s editorial board are William Dean Singleton, chairman; Chuck Plunkett, editor of the editorial pages; Megan Schrader, editorial writer; and Cohen Peart, opinion editor.