Low-balling wildfire budget burns everyone in the end
Tuesday, August 12, 2008 12:57 AM PDT
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It’s just the second week of August in a dry summer and the U.S. Forest Service has just about burned through its 2008 firefighting budget. The Oregonian newspaper in Portland reported Monday that the Forest Service has spent more than $1 billion of the $1.2 billion Congress appropriated this year for wildfire suppression. Agency officials told the Oregonian they expect to go $400 million over budget before the current wildfire season tapers off.
For the uninitiated, this might seem to be cause for alarm. But it’s more like business as usual. Federal firefighting budgets are typically depleted well before the end of the wildfire season. That’s been the case in most every dry summer and some wet ones for as long as most Forest Service officials can recall.
It’s become something of a budget ritual over the years. The agency underestimates the amount of money that will be needed for fire prevention and suppression before significant rains arrive in the fall, which is easy to do given the many unknowns. When the money runs out, Congress quickly approves an emergency supplemental budget.
But in recent years — this one included — Congress hasn’t been so quick with the emergency funding. Budget pressures associated with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have slowed the congressional response considerably, forcing the Forest Service to divert funds from other agency budgets to fire suppression. This is what’s being done this month to deal with the funding shortfall. The service’s regional office in Portland will have to ante up $24 million — 5 percent of the region’s annual budget — by the end of this week, according to the Oregonian.
This stopgap budgeting is a lousy way to make do. It’s wasteful, for one. Emily Platt, executive director of the Gifford Pinchot Task Force, told the Oregonian that the diversion of these funds to firefighting would mean that some matching grants from outside the Forest Service for maintenance and forest restoration projects will be lost. Moreover, the diversion of funds could be counterproductive. In the past, some of the accounts drained to replenish firefighting budgets held money designated for fire prevention projects and programs.
This is, as Platt told the Oregonian, “not a good way to manage public lands. Congress knows it, the Forest Service knows it, and it needs to be fixed.” Unfortunately, congressional leaders have shown little enthusiasm for reforming the fire suppression funding system, or even coming up with a timely appropriation of more money for fighting this season’s wildfires.
Im_not_saying wrote on Aug 12, 2008 10:48 AM:
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