Rethinking Forest Service funding
For the first time in three years, New Mexico dodged a disastrous wildfire season, but the chief of the U.S. Forest Service and a couple of New Mexico lawmakers sounded alarms last week about an exploding federal firefighting budget they say jeopardizes the Forest Service’s larger mission.
Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., joined U.S. Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell for a private briefing at the agency’s U.S. Fire Service Command Center in Washington Wednesday and invited me to sit in. Meanwhile, Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-NM, on Thursday presided over a U.S. House hearing that also examined the Forest Service’s budget woes.
The upshot of both meetings was that fighting wildfires now consumes more than half of the U.S. Forest Service’s total spending. Twenty years ago, the cost of fighting and preventing fires accounted for just 16 percent of the agency’s annual budget.
The Forest Service blames a variety of factors, including climate change that is producing hotter, drier summers, increasing tree disease and insect infestation, overgrowth of inflammable small trees and brush and increasing development near forests.
“From 2003 until 2014 our fire suppression budget request has gone up $740 million with a relatively flat budget, so that’s $740 million that is basically coming out of other programs,” Tidwell said, citing routine forest maintenance, vegetation and watershed management and other programs as those getting short shrift.
Heinrich, a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has introduced two bills to alleviate the budget strain and help protect precious western water supplies.
One of the bills would make it a federal priority to restore watersheds in areas impacted by fires. The other would treat the largest fires — roughly 1 percent of annual fires that consume 30 percent of the firefighting budget— as natural disasters and set up a special account for battling these blazes similar to those used for hurricanes and other disasters.
“Budgets aren’t growing and a bigger portion of the pie every year is moving,” to firefighting, Heinrich said, noting that some of the forest management work left undone because of constrained budgets would help prevent fires in the first place. “You can’t get there from here until you fix this fire budget issue.”
Lujan Grisham, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, has co-sponsored a House bill that, like Heinrich’s Senate bill, would also establish a natural disaster-like account that would help the Forest Service avoid having its annual budget burned up by firefighting costs. At the House hearing, she said that over the past three years, New Mexico endured some of “the biggest fires the state has ever seen.”
“The Whitewater-Baldy Complex, Las Conchas and the Gila fires devastated our land, resources and communities,” the congresswoman said, noting that the fire budget issue “certainly deserves our committee’s and Congress’ attention.”
Of course, the U.S. Forest Service has no shortage of critics who contend the agency is mismanaged and takes a wrongheaded approach to fighting fires in the first place
Three years ago, Rep. Steve Pearce, R-NM, went to the House floor and angrily condemned the Forest Service’s management of the Little Bear Fire near Roswell, saying the agency didn’t do enough to retard the fire’s growth in the early stages.
“We’re seeing this occur over and over and over again, and at some point, somebody has to make a decision that we get more active earlier,” Pearce was quoted as saying at the time.
Pearce and other Republicans have also criticized what they say is the Forest Service’s reluctance to allow commercial logging of heavy growth forests, which they say could help alleviate the problem.
Back at Forest Service headquarters, I asked Tidwell if there was any good news on the horizon. Is there anything from a tactical or technological standpoint that gives him reason to believe the Forest Service can get a better handle on the fires even as they grow hotter, larger and more frequent?
The Forest Service chief said large air tankers purchased by the federal government over the past two years for fighting fires — including a DC-10 stationed in Albuquerque — have helped get a quicker handle on blazes.
“They cost more but we made the decision to go with modern, faster planes that can carry larger loads, and they are making a big difference,” Tidwell said. “But really, a key part of changing the fire regime is going to be the treatments on the landscape. The thinning we do around communities to reduce the threat and the (preventive) fires we’re using in the backcountry to reduce the amount of biomass. We’re still going to have large fires for the foreseeable future but we can change the severity and definitely reduce the risk.”