Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter
Wildfires: House Passes Proactive (Really?) FLAME Act
When it comes to being forward thinking, proactive and strategically-thinking, the last organization that comes to mind is Congress. But this time, with the FLAME Act, they've done it.
By Joan McCarter, 7-15-08
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It’s been 20 years since the devastating Yellowstone fire, the cataclysmic event that pushed wildfire into the national psyche. In those 20 years, sustained drought, shifting weather patterns, diseased forests, and decades of forest mismanagement have combined to give us one horrific fire season after another. The costs of fighting these fires has been compounded not only because of the volume of them, but because more and more people are moving into wooded areas forcing agencies to protect life and property. Already this year, the National Interagency Fire Center reports more than 2.1 million acres have burned in nearly 37,000 separate wildland fires--that’s as of June 30.
Fire has eaten up more than just acreage. Fully 48 percent of the Forest Service budget in recent years has been consumed by fire. Last year, the Forest Service spent $741 million more than budgeted and Interior spent $249 million more than budgeted for emergency wildfire suppression, or a total of nearly $1 billion. A couple of months ago, I wrote here on the Bush administration’s plan for paying for all this:
Not all of the Bush administration’s efforts to sell America off to private interests is as blatant as the military contracts that have been awarded in Iraq. Check out this plot hatched deep in the bowels of the Interior Department: slash forest fire prevention budgets, then propose that the shortfalls in budgets be made up by selling off the timber that would have otherwise had to have been protected from fire. That’s a downright clever plan for this crowd.
Here’s the Bush budget proposal for the next year:
Bush’s budget calls for a $150 million increase in federal funding for the U.S. Forest Service to extinguish blazes, bringing the agency’s total firefighting budget to more than $1.14 billion, according to figures provided to the subcommittee.But the proposal slashes the agency’s preparedness funding by $77 million, including a $13 million reduction in money to remove dead trees and overgrown brush that act as kindling for fires in 155 national forests.
That amounts to more than an 11 percent decrease from last year’s preparedness budget of around $5.9 million.
Meanwhile, the Forest Service budget as a whole keeps shrinking; its budget this fiscal year is $4.13 billion--a decrease of $64.5 million. This is, of course, in keeping with Bush’s “Healthy Forests” plan, overseen by Undersecretary for Natural Resource and Environment Mark Rey, known in his pre-administration days as the nation’s foremost timber lobbyist and key staffer to Sen. “Wide Stance” Craig. A healthy forest is one without all those trees to get in the way, and the best way to achieve that is to force the agency charged with protecting the trees to sell them all off to the timber companies. Impeccable, if twisted, logic.
The House of Representatives is throwing a monkey wrench into that project with what seems to be an incredibly practical plan--create a separate budget for responding to wildfire. Last week it passed the Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement (FLAME--cute, huh?) Act. The bill sets up a permanent fund for fire fighting. As reported when the bill was introduced:
The new fund would be used only for catastrophic, emergency wildland fire suppression. It would be separate from the money budgeted each year by Congress for anticipated and predicted fire suppression activities for the Forest Service and Interior Department; that allocation would continue.
The amount of money in the new fund would be appropriated annually and based on the average amounts spent by the Forest Service and Interior to suppress catastrophic fires over the preceding five fiscal years....
The secretaries of the departments would be able to declare fires eligible for the fund by issuing a suppression emergency declaration that would evaluate the size, severity and threat of the fire.
The bill has gotten some serious support, from the five former Chiefs of the Forest Service, the National Association of State Foresters, the National Association of Counties, the National Federation of Federal Employees, the Western Governor’s Association, and nearly 40 other conservation and community-based forestry organizations. In a letter to the bill’s sponsors, [pdf] the Chiefs explain the impact on the Forest Service of fire:
Proposed funding for fire suppression, reflecting the rising ten-year average cost, increases by $148 million in the FY2009 proposed budget. Fire funding is approaching 50 percent of the Forest Service budget. As a result, staffing for basic stewardship of the National Forests is well below that needed to protect and manage these valuable public lands. In the last six years, the available staff on the National Forest System has declined 35 percent. The number of resource specialists available for basic inventory and monitoring has declined 44 percent; the number of personnel to provide services to the 192 million annual recreation visitors have declined 28 percent, and the number biologists and technicians available to manage some of the most important fish and wildlife habitat in the nation has declined 39 percent. Loss of these essential personnel is intolerable. Our nation must find a way to fund the increasing costs of protecting these lands from fire without decimating the organization needed to protect and manage them for the American people.
That support comes in part because, beyond providing ongoing, stable funding for emergency fire suppression, it does something even more proactive--it “requires the agencies to develop a cohesive strategy for managing wildland fire. Elements of that strategy include systems to ensure agencies are assessing risks to communities, prioritizing hazardous fuel reduction treatments accordingly, and providing the appropriate management response to all fire starts.”
The management plan side of this would hopefully go a long way toward getting these agencies in the mindset of planning for fire, as much as is possible. It’s not a perfect bill, as the State Foresters point out because it “includes language that would continue to base the suppression budget amount on the 10-year average of all events, emergency and normal--a practice which forces the Forest Service to pull funds from fire prevention and preparedness, hazardous fuels mitigation, and other forest management programs that are the long-term solutions to the nation’s ever increasing wildland fire problems.”
Senator Boxer has introduced the bill on the Senate side, where legislators need to clarify that this separate budget does not reduce the agencies’ budgets for other activities--prevention, reforestation, forest restoration, and increasingly, people wrangling. It’s not going to solve the problem if funding for all of the fire prevention activities is permanently reduced to what the agencies have been forced to spend in the past decade as they’ve diverted funds to fight the fires. They need to reject the Bush administration’s efforts to slash fire prevention funding.
Beyond the Senate fixes, the bill needs to be signed by the president, which would seem like a given this summer when we’ve seen California go up in flames. But if it means fewer public trees to give away to Mark Rey’s buddies, there’s no guarantee.
Editor’s note: Joan McCarter’s weekly blogs are part of NewWest.Net/Politics’ “Diary of a Mad Voter” feature, a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. For more columns check in with www.newwest.net/madvoter. And for more information on each of the bloggers, click here.
Hm....it is the harvest of those so-called "public trees" that can truly help prevent some of the catastrophic fire disasters we have all gotten to witness lately. The recent Ninth Circuit Court decision, The Lands Council v. McNair, hallmarks a trend in which even the nation's most liberal court system has noted that the current "just let it burn" stance is NOT working. Responsible natural resource development is always something that should be welcomed.
Comment By Matthew Koehler, 7-15-08Joan, Thanks for writing about the House passing the FLAME bill...something that most media outlets seem to have ignored. Our organization - the WildWest Institute - was one of the "nearly 40 other conservation and community-based forestry organizations" that supported the FLAME Act, as did the five former FS Chiefs, as you mentioned.
It's "wildfire season", so once again I feel the need to remind folks to cut it out with the war metaphors and all the talk about fires being "catastrophic" and "destroying" the forests.
While the lead-in to your story ("It’s been 20 years since the devastating Yellowstone fire, the cataclysmic event that pushed wildfire into the national psyche.") might make for some good writing, it's wrong to say that the Yellowstone fires were "devastating" in any ecological sense of the word.
The Billings Gazette/Lee Enterprises actually just completed a fair and accurate look back at the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Their whole series is available at http://billingsgazette.net/specialreport/?s/yellowstone/ .
I would encourage people to read through the series and, in light of my comments above, pay particular attention to the article titled, "Blazes of 1988 changed but didn't devastate forest ecosystem." The link is here:
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2008/07/08/news/wyoming/17-yellowstone_s.txt
Thank you.
Matthew, I don't think the folks in California got the memo about the use of the word, "catastrophic." See: http://www.kcbs.com/pages/2576490.php?
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As wildfires burn throughout the state, Governor Schwarzenegger and Senator Diane Feinstein are asking the federal government for help.
“We have five times the fire burned of last year, and six times the five year average,” said Feinstein. “This is truly a catastrophic situation, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more concerned.”
In Washington, the senator is pleading with lawmakers to give California $910 million in an emergency spending bill for firefighting efforts. In the meantime, Governor Schwarzenegger has sent a letter to the president asking for additional personnel and training for National Guard troops to aid exhausted firefighters.
August, September and October are traditionally the big fire months in California, and Feinstein is concerned by what we've seen already in May, June and July.
“This has started so early, the state is so dry, it’s so hot, and the fires are so dispersed, that it presents a very difficult picture in terms of being able to adequately suppress them.”
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Memo to Craig:
The reason that California wildfires are so "catastrophic" is because people continue to insist on building in the wildland/urban interface.
Any trained fire fighter (and many folks with a modicum of common sense) could predict that thousands of homes in California are indefensible in certain circumstances of drought, heat, vegetation growth, wind -- all the factors that have come into play this summer.
I can feel sorry for individuals, but when thousands and millions of people insist on building in the wildland/urban interface, in flood plains, in earthquake/volcanic zones and on hurricain-prone flooding beaches WITHOUT ANY defensive measures, why do I have to pay for their repeated mistakes and near-sightedness?
(Wow! Starting to sound like a libertarian there.)
if they would allow the wildlife (Bison)to graze of the grasses, that would reduce fire hazards a LOT.
Comment By bear bait, 7-16-08As usual, you demean the victims to sell your point. Mom and Dad have two children, educate them, and they go off on their own. Mom and Dad, and grandma and grandpa are still alive. Where will the kids live? The population increase, fueled by births and immigration, produces a demand for housing. Where to site it?
Do you tear down an existing house and build a 4 plex? Do you build a section 8 tenement in the middle of the city? That has a track record of failure. Much of the housing is built on raw land. Now where does raw land come from? Outer space? Or is it former farm, range, or forest land? And who makes the decision that housing can be built on what kind of land? Do we save the forests by clear cutting huge buffers between them and new housing? Do we site on productive farm land? Decrease biofuels and food production? Or on forest land? Since the public land managers and the Green NGOs feel that forests are only viable after they burn, and logging is the worst thing that could ever happen, our forests burn, and homes are collateral damage. We import our building materials from all over the world, so it appears forest land is the most available and cheapest land on which to house an expanding population.
Joan's reference to Interior's plan to log once again on the revested (the San Francisco RR moguls did not sell the checkerboard lands they got to build the Oregon and California RR, in violation of their charter, and Interior took them back in 1938) O&C;lands which Interior was supposed to by treaty with Oregon, to log on a sustainable basis, sharing the gross returns on a 25/75 formula, the 75% going to the counties to be divided on a pro rata basis on the number of acres of O&C;land in each county. That 75% was reduced to 50% after WWII, and then that 50% was divided in half, with the one half going to the counties, and the other half to public roads to access timber. The NGOs used the ESA to stop logging, and the counties got a Payment in Lieu of Taxes deal in exchange for "old growth ecosystem" habitat management. The major protected species, the Spotted Owl, continues to decline, mostly due to the incursions of another owl species of the same family, the Eastern Barred Owl, and interbreeding and territorial issues seem to favor the Barred Owl. The Owl Immigration Crisis has now become so serious that trained Barred Owl assassins are proposed to limit their spread. Only in the bowels of government and the NGOs can there be a black wet division for wildlife.
The counties are in court, lobbying Congress, for resumption of the sustained yield logging the agreement with Oregon and Interior signed in 1938 was to guarantee. But, like most treaties Congress signs, they break. We are the Treaty Breaking Nation of the World. Ask any Native American. Or Oregon O&C;county commissioner. So the BLM, a part of Interior, has proposed to honor that treaty, and go back to selling timber. That is the real deal Joan is referring to, and now with at least two and maybe three Oregon counties heavily owned by Interior or the USFS, and little land to tax or otherwise provide income to run government, are proposing bankruptcy, the Congress has decided to not fund the counties in any way, and activists are pulling out the stops to keep BLM from selling timber that would provide a revenue flow to the affected counties. Of course, Joan bought the enviro-activist viewpoint hook, line and sinker. I am just trying to address the reality and the facts of the deal. Sell trees, recover money, and Interior has fire fighting money and the counties have a revenue stream plus employment and more people working. What a concept!!
There is a growing contingent of private wildland fire fighting effort hired by insurance companies to keep insured properties from going up in flames. That puts a crimp in the Federal fire effort, and is sure to hamper their drop back three miles and set a backfire approach to fire fighting that was an outcome of the Ellreese Daniels indictment for manslaughter a year ago because he, as an Incident Commander, had made the bad decisions that got 4 USFS type 2 fire fighters killed in the 30 mile Fire...It should be noted, now, right here, that Daniels was offered an election year plea bargain deal by the US Attorney that provided a guilty plea to a couple of misdemeanor charges, which he took, and the case is closed. One real benefit of the plea bargain is the US Govt, Bush administration, Republican, is not prosecuting a black man for the deaths of white middle class kids working at a summer job for the USFS. The trial could have been a distraction in this election year, and senior overhead was abandoning the Type 1 and 2 fire overhead teams in droves due to the advent of personal liability the US Attorney was pursuing. I have no idea if justice was served, but Jesse Jackson, et al, lost a soap box. I would guess the box is empty and the soap was used to wash out Jesse's mouth after his open mike discussion of his idea of a Testicle Festival.
I, and probably the voting public, really don't give a damn who fights the fire, how government will pay for it. Just get the job done. The sooner the better. I also think the public is not now in great support of the WFU, Let 'er Burn, method of fuel reduction. Too much collateral damage, and too many heritage forest acres destroyed of the vegetative offerings that were their primary attraction. A dead 700 year old tree is not going to be replaced for at least 700 years. And not by an also dead 500 year old tree or a dead 300 year old tree that was also killed by the fire. Those are values that the public expects to be protected and at this time they are not. WFU is not protecting the here and now, and that is what the public is most concerned with.
The accounting for budget dollars for the Federal land management agencies in regard to fire should be further examined for the true cost to the public. In a simplistic world, and that is what works best with the astute mental powers of our Congress, it should be noted that if the Feds sell some of the fuel to be removed, they do add dollars to the Federal income stream. We know it costs money to suppress fire. We know that some of what burns has a market value higher before fire than after. If a million dollars of wood is sold, and that sale comes with a condition that the purchaser burn piled slash in the wet season, and the result is fuel reduction, fire resistant tree spacing, and much of the non merchantable fuel is piled and burned, cash flow is generated directly to the Feds, and the resulting work also provides a tax revenue stream as the payrolls, payroll taxes, and labor purchasing power flows through the economy. Congress understands that kind of thinking. NGOs sucking at the teat of annual trust disbursement do not. No matter what economic stream they interrupt or stop, theirs continues because it is made money, old money, and has to be given away each year in order to avoid taxes. No matter how you do it, losing a possible million dollars of income and having to spend two million dollars to suppress a fire on the same land, the loss is three million dollars. The budge item is a three million dollar cost. You go from a million dollar positive income stream to a three million dollar negative income outgo. And that is public land management finances in these United States at this time. No campsites, no trails, no visitor centers, no access, all due to fire and no income stream. A public forest program that once paid its way is now a giant financial hole, growing larger each year, and very little inclination from the majority of Congress from far, far away to help.
The old growth forest, the anthropogenic forest, was here for Europeans to find, and was the result of thousands of years of proactive human effort to maintain and control an environment that successfully nurtured those people for ten thousand years or more. At times, it seems really silly for the people who sent a man to the moon to struggle to keep that forest alive and representative of its original state as found by Cortez and all those who came after. We do prove, time and again, we don't have the leadership to take us where we wish to be, nor the visionaries who can paint the picture. And it is all there, right now, in learned volumes for all to read. If people have lived with and in the forest since before written time might record, then it is certainly possible for us to do the same without having to struggle with conflagration growing more intense with each passing year. We are thinking beings, capable of understanding and knowing how to reach to the goal. All we need is the will to do it. The national will to not burn the countryside, and the treasures it holds, year after year after. Too many people, unemployed, who could pickup sticks, pack them to piles for future burning. Too much money being spent on the wrong results instead of the right preventions. The just ain't no Teddy Roosevelts, no Gifford Pinchots, working in America today in our vast bureaucracy of complacency and red tape litigation. I guess that is how Congress and the electors want it.
It would seem that many of the misfortunes of todays societies could easily be remedied by putting people to work. Work builds confidence and self-pride. We have thousands of inmates sitting in air conditioned facilities with their libraries; cable TV; weight rooms and recreation rooms. Doesn't sound like much of a punishment to me. The inmates available for work crews now could be used to clear the forest floors of debris that would minimize fuel during forest fires. There are many tasks in state and federal parks that they could do and minimize the budget spent on hiring people to do this. Welfare recipients are another group that should give to society for what's been given to them. Don't get me wrong, I believe that we need to help those in need, but it seems welfare begats welfare and we have generations of unproductive adults. Let's give them, in fact let's require them, an opportunity to give back to the communities. Our teenager's run the streets with no direction or mentors to look up to. Teach them a trade; help give them some self respect. Where did we lose the acceptance of responsibility for our own actions and the responsibility for ourselves? Every action has a consequence. The old adage of the grasshopper and the ant comes to mind. Maybe its time to adopt the principals.
Comment By Tom, 7-16-08I agree with Diane, However, When FDR created the CCC, he was called the biggest hero in history. When Reagan proposed an identical program, he was called the biggest monster in history.
If you can figure out how to take the unions and far left politicians out of the mix it might work.