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Napolitano urges Congress to fund wildfire suppression

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With much of the West on the doorstep of another potentially devastating wildfire season, Gov. Janet Napolitano on Thursday urged Congress to approve a permanent federal funding stream specifically for fire suppression efforts.

In her testimony before the House Natural Resources Committee in support of the Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act, Napolitano said Western forests are in a "perfect storm" of conditions that promise more of the costly "mega-fires" such as 2002's 467,000-acre Rodeo-Chediski Fire and 2003's 84,000-acre Aspen Fire, which burned through the heart of Summerhaven on Mount Lemmon.

"Decades of fuel accumulations and acres of beetle-killed timber, the rapid expansion of the wildland-urban interface, and the overarching presence of drought and climate change have now combined to dramatically increase the number and size of mega-fires," Napolitano told the committee.

Testifying on behalf of the Western Governors Association, Napolitano said the bill, known as the FLAME Act, would relieve an enormous burden on the U.S. Forest Service's budget and end the practice of redirecting wildfire prevention and forest restoration funds to pay for fire suppression.

The bill — introduced by the committee's chairman, Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., and co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of 40 other representatives that includes Democrat Raúl Grijalva of Tucson — would create a fund to pay for catastrophic wildfires that is separate from other appropriations to agencies that manage forests and other federal lands.

The bill has the support of five Forest Service chiefs who led the agency from 1979 to 2007. R. Max Peterson, F. Dale Robertson, Jack Ward Thomas, Michael P. Dombeck and Dale N. Bosworth jointly submitted a letter to the committee last month that argued the funding of fire suppression was putting the Forest Service in "an untenable financial position."

"Our nation must find a way to fund the increasing costs of protecting these lands from fire without decimating the organization needed to protect and manage them for the American people," the former chiefs wrote.

Fire suppression costs of roughly $200 million a year consumed about 20 percent of the overall Forest Service budget in the 1990s. By contrast, six of the last eight years have seen fire suppression costs top $1 billion, and the increased cost of fighting wildfires now takes up more than half the Forest Service's budget.

Even in a relatively light fire year, as 2007 was for the Southwest, fire-suppression costs were nearly $50 million just for national forest land in Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas, said Cathie Schmidlin, a spokeswoman for the Southwest Region of the Forest Service.

"In the Southwest area, generally it wasn't real active like it has been some other years," she said.

The FLAME fund would be equal to the average federal wildfire suppression costs over the last five years, and although the committee hasn't calculated the precise amount, the fund would likely top $1 billion in its first year, said Natalie Luna, a spokeswoman for Grijalva. The next step for the bill is a full-committee vote, which is not yet scheduled but could come within the next two weeks, she said.

According to the latest regional forecast, the potential for significant wildfire activity during April is above normal for Southern and Southeastern Arizona, including Coronado National Forest lands and most or all of Pima, Santa Cruz, Cochise, Pinal, Graham and Greenlee counties.

The National Interagency Fire Center defines a significant fire as a fire that requires resources from outside the area.

The rest of Arizona is facing normal fire potential, but most of southern and eastern New Mexico and West Texas also have elevated risk of significant fires in the near term.

Abundant fuels and persistent drought across most of the state are leading to above-normal fire potential starting in May. The elevated fire danger will follow the typical pattern in the state throughout the summer until the monsoon moisture and rain decrease fire potential, according to the federal assessment.

So far this year, there have been 295 reported fires covering 124,235 acres in the Southwest Region, which includes Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas.

Most of the fires have been in New Mexico, with the Stiles Complex burning 67,000 acres of grassland near Hobbs in the southeastern part of the state.

In Arizona, 78 fires covering 4,362 acres have been reported in 2008. The National Interagency Fire Center's projection for the entire fire season is for 607 fires covering 167,141 acres.

The Southwest region has ranged from a low of 183 fires in 2005 to a high of 1,129 fires in 2002, and from a low of 7,690 acres in 2001 to 258,107 acres in 2006.