So far, national firefighting costs total about $900 million, and Rey fully expects them to go over $1 billion. But the 2006 record of $1.4 billion shouldn't be eclipsed unless Southern California, which has a fall fire season, has a bad year.
“It all depends on the Santa Ana winds and what sort of season we have there in California,” said Rey, who visited with the Missoulian's editorial board on Thursday afternoon. “We'll have to be very lucky for the balance of the year.”
“When you have those events, you prioritize the fires, trying to get the ones that will affect communities first,” Rey said. “But you're not going to get them all, and some of them are going to get away from you.”
Rey said the days when federal agencies tried to knock down every forest fire are over. First, it's just not possible. As importantly, it's bad science. Forests need fires, although fire managers must be mindful of fires that burn close to the urban/wildland interface, which saw huge home growth in the 1990s.
The fact that fire managers look at the woods differently than they did generations ago doesn't mean that past suppression efforts were misguided. They were based on what was known at the time. Rey said it would be a “misapplication of history” to fault former forest managers for putting out every wildfire they could.
“With new knowledge, we've modified our tactics,” Rey said. “We put them out where we don't want them to burn, to the extent that we can.”
Rey said fire managers now gauge conditions on the ground - the dryness of fuels, for instance - the value of ecological resources and the possibility of a fire causing damage to homes and other buildings in determining when and how to fight fire.
Rey answered a host of questions about fire on Thursday, but what he really wanted to talk about is the current farm bill proposed by the Bush administration. A bill has passed the House, and the Senate is expected to pick up the debate after it returns from the August recess.
Farm policy is dictated by the 2002 bill, but that law expires at year's end, giving the current debate some sense of urgency, Rey said.
In general, the administration's proposal aims to make farm policy more market-oriented, more predictable, less market-distorting and better able to withstand challenges.
Although much is made of the commodity payments made to farmers by the government - those payments kick in when prices dip below target prices set by the government - farmers don't think they're the best way to do business, Rey said.
Often, payments are made in years of record-breaking harvests, when farmers do well despite a dip in prices. What's needed, Rey said, is a policy that helps farmers when they really need it, in years where crops are wiped out by natural disasters. Rey said big, industrial farm companies are against capping commodity payments as well as the bill's proposal to make farmers with adjusted incomes of more than $200,000 ineligible for payments.
The proposed bill would also revitalize conservation programs for farmers and ranchers, help farmers who grow specialty crops, promote other bio-fuels and help people interested in agriculture get started with low-interest loans and down payments.
Rey said the House bill is a good start, but it steers clear of some of the changes in the administration's proposal.
“We're optimistic about our chances in the Senate, and there could be some work done on the bill in conference committee as well,” Rey said.
The Senate will pick up the farm bill in September.
In a humorous aside, Rey said he arrived in Missoula on Wednesday night to find that his hotel reservation had somehow been canceled.
That, he said, got him to thinking about U.S. District Judge Don Molloy. Why?
Molloy is sitting on a case where he has ruled that the government violated the National Environmental Policy Act by using fire retardant, which contains the chemical ammonium phosphate, without doing an environmental analysis on the danger it might pose.
In a recent order, the judge ordered Rey to appear in court on Oct. 15 if the U.S. Forest Service fails to perform the analysis. The judge seemed doubtful that the agency would comply, and Rey might face a contempt charge if the analysis isn't forthcoming. In which case, of course, he wouldn't need a hotel room.
But Rey said the judge won't need to send him to a certain lodging facility on Mullan Road.
“The analysis will be done,” he said. “We will make the deadline for the judge.”
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com
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