Red Lodge Clearinghouse

The Forest Service has been criticized in recent years as fire suppression has burned large holes in its annual budget and put other agency priorities at risk.

In a letter to House lawmakers, the former Forest Service chiefs note that fire suppression accounts for almost half the agency funding in President Bush's fiscal 2009 budget proposal, a $148 million increase over 2008 levels.

Meanwhile, they write, other agency needs have suffered. National Forest System staffing, for example, has declined 35 percent over the last six years and the number of resource specialists available for inventories and monitoring has declined 44 percent.

"Loss of these essential personnel is intolerable," the letter says. "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."

The letter is signed by R. Max Peterson, who led the service between 1979 and 1987; F. Dale Robertson, 1987-1993; Jack Ward Thomas, 1993-1996; Michael Dombeck, 1997-2001; and Dale Bosworth, 2001-2007. They wrote a similar letter to lawmakers last year.

The "Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act" (FLAME Act) would allow withdrawals from the firefighting account if the secretaries of Agriculture and Interior declare that a fire 300 acres or larger is severe and complex enough to warrant special funding. Congress would provide money for the fund based on average firefighting costs over the last five fiscal years.

The bill would not change the current practice of setting the Forest Service and Interior Department firefighting budgets based on the 10-year average of fire-suppression costs but would simply remove catastrophic fires from the service's budget.

Democratic Reps. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and Norm Dicks of Washington are sponsoring the bill.

Dombeck said the agency suffered from the same problem during his tenure, calling the issue reflective of the larger inadequacies of the agency's business model that is based on once-profitable timber sales.

"The days of paying for the operation of the Forest Service on the back of a large commercial timber program is outdated and needs to be modernized," Dombeck said in an e-mail response to questions. "The Rahall bill is a very positive step in the right direction. But the problem is well beyond the scope of fire."

Forest Service spokeswoman Allison Stewart said the agency was studying the effects of the fund on its operations.

'Piece of a puzzle'

Several forestry experts warned yesterday that creating a separate fund would not solve the larger question of funding wildfire management.

"We see this issue as one piece of a puzzle that if we don't address the other pieces to we won't solve the problem," said Michael Mortimer, policy director for the Society of American Foresters.

One major concern has been what would happen to the Forest Service's budget if its largest component was suddenly removed. Would other programs get more funding? Or would the agency be left with a smaller overall operating budget?

Kirk Rowdabaugh, president of the National Association of State Foresters, said fire suppression historically has accounted for about 20 percent of the agency's annual budget. Catastrophic fires in recent years have caused that portion to increase, he said.

Removing funding for catastrophic fires from the agency budget, he said, would cause the 10-year average wildfire costs to plummet and would hurt the agency's normal firefighting operations.

To maintain the firefighting budget, Rowdabaugh said lawmakers should amend the bill to recalculate the Forest Service's normal 10-year average as if the FLAME Act account has been in existence through that period to return the fire-suppression budget to its historical norm.

"We don't have 10 years to reset the 10-year average," Rowdabaugh said. "The problem is here now."

'Mixed messages'

Some critics say the bill would allow the government to continue throwing money at the problem rather than attempt to fix it. In this case, they say the fund does not address the larger issue of fire management, including cost containment.

"It's kind of sending mixed messages to the agencies," said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. "On the one hand, there's all this concern about cost suppression, then again there is this slush fund for fire suppression."

A Government Accountability Office report last year said agencies in both the departments of Interior and Agriculture have identified weaknesses in cost containment but have yet to define cost-containment goals or develop a strategy for achieving them.

Ingalsbee said the legislation does not adequately address forest ecology, which benefits more by letting a fire burn than by attempting to extinguish it. He said forestry efforts could be better served by working out forest management plans that would outline when a fire should be allowed to burn.

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