These reports are a clear signal that, though summer may be months away, it's not too early to start thinking about the coming wildfire season - and how we're going to cover the enormous costs of fire suppression.
Last year the U.S. Forest Service spent nearly $1 billion fighting wildfires, while Montana spent nearly $43 million. As the costs of fighting wildfires have risen, lawmakers at both the state and federal levels have turned up the heat over their budget battles.
Which means it is even more important for states like Montana to have a solid system in place for paying the ever-increasing costs of fire suppression. Unfortunately, we have yet to come up with such a system. Instead, we rely year after year on using so-called “emergency funds” to bail us out.
That's true at the federal level as well. The Forest Service has repeatedly outspent its firefighting budget, and our federal legislators have had to approve new after-the-fact funding to pay the bills.
It's time for lawmakers to pull their heads out of the sand and recognize that, while wildfires that threaten our homes may present an emergency, the fact that it costs a lot of money to fight them isn't exactly a surprise and we need to stop exhausting our emergency funds to pay for them.
It's no easy thing to accurately predict just how wild our next wildfire season will be. Of course, it's also difficult to predict just how much money it will cost to repair and maintain our roads, and yet we seem capable of budgeting for road maintenance costs without raiding our emergency account each year.
A couple of bills have been presented in Congress that would create new funds that could only be tapped to fight catastrophic wildfires. One of those bills was introduced last year by Montana Sen. Max Baucus, and has since passed through a Senate committee. Another bill like it is being discussed in the House.
We would like to see a similar fund proposed for Montana. While there are many different ways the fund could be set up, ideally it would include enough money to defray at least a portion of the total costs and take some of the pressure off the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.
Of course, the trouble with setting aside taxpayer money for a new firefighting fund is that it is certain to get used up - although not necessarily on firefighting costs. So any legislation to create such a fund would have to include a way of keeping a strict accounting of that money. And it should also include contingency plans for unspent funds, so that any dollars left over at the end of the wildfire season would either go toward the next year's firefighting efforts or back into taxpayer pockets.
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