© 2024 Wyoming Public Media
800-729-5897 | 307-766-4240
Wyoming Public Media is a service of the University of Wyoming
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Transmission & Streaming Disruptions

Fire Reforms Heat Up Congress

National Park Service

Pine beetles and drought is leaving Wyoming and other states more susceptible to wildfires than at any point in recent memory, yet the federal fire policy doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the new climate. Wyoming lawmakers are trying to solve the problem.

Senator Mike Enzi is a wonk. As an accountant and numbers junkie when he arrived in Washington in the nineties, he was always surprised when Congress would rush to pass about five billion dollars a year for emergencies like wildfires. But now Enzi holds a gavel. As he walked along the train at the Capitol, he explained it’s time to plan for fires.

“I’m the chairman of the Budget Committee, I said you know if you got something you know is going to happen every year you, you ought to budget for it. So you’ll find that we have 7 billion dollars a year budgeted for emergencies and we also got wildfires declared as an emergency.”

Wyoming’s junior Senator John Barrasso has introduced legislation that would force the Forest Service to forecast the cost of the fire season in advance, so lawmakers don’t have to cobble together an emergency package once fires are raging.

“Well I think it’s important to actually have money in an account in preparation for wildfires, so the money is there, instead of trying to just take money from other accounts where it’s necessary as well.”  

That taking money from other accounts to pay for fires is dubbed fire-borrowing, which Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski eliminated from the new Interior spending bill. But now Democrats are threatening to filibuster the bill, partly because it drastically cuts funding for agencies like the EPA. But Murkowski says paying to combat fires up front is a huge step forward. Environmentalists say fires are more than just a budget problem. Rebecca Judd is Senior Legislative Council with Earth Justice.  

“Well, frankly I think Congress isn’t adapting as well as it can be. The biggest hurdle facing the forest service is its ability to not only prevent forest fires but also to fight wildfires once they happen is funding.”  

Judd says as climate change has made the west more susceptible to forest fires in the past few years, Republicans have been focusing on budget cuts.  

“With the severe and austere budget cuts from sequestration the forest service budget is under enormous constraint and they now having to raid the rest of their vital program work on recreational maintenance, restoration, trail maintenance, all of the other great benefits that our national forests provide.”

Wyoming Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis agrees that it’s more than a budget problem, but she says regulatory hurdles are preventing companies from harvesting timber.

“We need a variety of forest health initiatives including conservation for lumber cutting to be allowed and that means expediting the processes that are slowing down the ability to thin the forests so they can withstand wildfires.”

A part of the problem is Western lawmakers struggle to convince their Eastern counterparts that forests are a priority unless there’s a raging inferno going on. Lummis says the problem is simple.

“There are many more lawmakers in the east than in the west.”

In southern Wyoming, where there’s been a lot of pine beetle kill, Senator Enzi says the federal government is impeding businesses that actually want the timber that poses the biggest risk for fires.

“I toured one saw mill down there that said they could use three times as much timber of that pine beetle kill if they could get it. So we need to turn some of those loose and get the forest cleaned up and cut down the amount of fires.”

In South Dakota, they’re experimenting with a new way to bid forestation. Normally  there’s a bid for logging, then a separate cleanup bid, then yet another one for the trail in and out, but now they’re bundling it all together, which Enzi says other states should start doing.

“So somebody came up with the idea of packaging them all, they’re getting bids for it that finishes up the work and I think both sides, the timbering and environmentalists, like the new way of doing it. So I hope it catches on in other states.”

While it appears Congress may be making headway on the issue, they aren’t. Because while Republicans want budgeted fire spending, they also want to reduce funding to the Environmental Protection Agency due to some of their unpopular policies, so Democrats say they will filibuster GOP spending bills. So it appears that many of the bipartisan, firefighting and prevention reforms are doomed in this Congress. 

Based on Capitol Hill, Matt Laslo is a reporter who has been covering campaigns and every aspect of federal policy since 2006. While he has filed stories for NPR and more than 40 of its affiliates, he has also written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Campaigns and Elections Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Guardian, The Omaha World-Herald, VICE News and Washingtonian Magazine.
Related Content