U.S. Senators from Idaho, Washington, and other western states have introduced an updated version of their bipartisan wildfire funding solution that would protect desperately needed funding for fire prevention and treat wildfires as the natural disasters they are.
In the wake of historic wildfires in Oregon, Idaho, California, Washington, and across the West, the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of 2017 would end the destructive cycle of borrowing from fire prevention accounts to put out fires, and reform the way the federal government funds the events.
Unlike for other natural disasters, where agencies can draw from an emergency fund to pay for disaster response, the U.S. Forest Service and Interior Department do not have access to those funds and are forced to “fire borrow” – or steal money from fire prevention and other important programs already funded in their agencies to pay to put out fires.
Currently, federal agencies calculate wildfire suppression budgets based on the average costs of wildfire suppression over the past 10 years. But as fire seasons grow longer and wildfires have become more expensive to fight, Congress is forced to appropriate more funding to an outdated budgeting system.
The updated legislation would fund wildfires as natural disasters and protect the agencies’ fire prevention budgets by putting a freeze on the rising budget costs of the 10-year average. It would end “fire borrowing” by allowing the agencies to fund any fire suppression spending needed above the frozen average through disaster funding just like other agencies can access disaster funding for tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. (Idaho U.S. Senator Mike Crapo News Release)
