For the first time in the Forest Service’s 110-year history, it now spends more than half of its annual budget to fight wildfires.
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Between last fiscal year and this year, the suppression budget grew by $115 million and non-fire programs were reduced by that amount, the report says.
With the number of fires escalating, fighting them could eat up “as much as two-thirds of the budget” in the next 10 years, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in an interview Wednesday.
The Forest Service attributes the increased spending in part to climate change.
“Today, fire seasons are 78 days longer than in the 1970s”, the report states. As it stands now, over 46 million homes and over 70,000 communities are vulnerable to wildfire.
Covering those costs often requires the transferring of money allocated for other areas such as forest restoration activities, which are designed to help reduce the threat of catastrophic fires, according to the report.
The bill, known as the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, has bipartisan support in the House and the Senate, but neither has voted on it yet.
A procession will be held Sunday, and Ruhl will be accompanied by engines from the Black Hills National Forest and will be joined by numerous other fire departments along the journey, they said.
Lawmakers are seeking budget solutions amid a superheated political climate as the wildland fires now raging across California, Washington and other Western states burn through federal dollars as well as forests. In effect, the Forest Service saw its money pool drop by almost half a billion dollars in 2015, compared to the funding available in 1995 to handle non-fire related programs, the bulk of its programming.
The situation, says US Rep. Mike Simpson (R) of Idaho, “has created a devastating cycle that prevents agencies from doing needed hazardous fuels removal or timber harvests, leading to worse fires”.
“Instead of treating catastrophic wildfires as a normal agency expense, we must treat them more like other natural disasters, such as tornadoes or hurricanes”, the report concludes.
Cal Fire crews have responded to more than 4,200 wildfires large and small so far this year, about 1,500 more than average. “But because we’re shifting so many resources to fire right now, making those projects happen is getting more hard for the agency”. A funding bill she moved out of the committee earlier this year stuck to tight sequestration budget caps, but also sought a solution for some of the escalating firefighting costs.
The Forest Service’s fire-related staffing, for instance, has increased by 118 percent since 1998, while forest management staff fell by 39 percent during the same period. These proposals provide a fiscally responsible way to treat wildfires more like other natural disasters, end transfers and partially replenish our capacity to restore resilient forests and protect against future fires.
Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said the report was timely given the current pact of wildfires in the country.
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“If this continues, the Forest Service is just going to be a massive fire department”, he said. Public lands the Forest Service manages contribute more than $13 billion to the economy each year through visitor spending alone.
