The $1.3 trillion spending bill headed for a vote in Congress this week includes a bipartisan measure creating a disaster fund to help fight the wildfires that have swept Western states in recent years.
Fundamentally changing how the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies pay for wildland firefighting, the bill would set aside more than $20 billion over 10 years in an emergency fund that could be tapped when firefighting budgets are depleted. In the past, the Forest Service has been forced to raid non-fire accounts to pay for firefighting costs, thereby depleting funds needed for timber management, prescribed burning and other fire-prevention work. Last year, federal firefighting costs reached a record $2.7 billion.
The bill also would eliminate an existing funding mechanism that ties each year’s firefighting budget to the 10-year average for wildfires – a practice that left accounts increasingly short as wildfires burned wider swaths over longer periods each year.
Western senators, Forest Service officials and other forest advocates have long sought a comprehensive funding fix for firefighting agencies – and an end to so-called “fire borrowing.”
If approved, the measure would use a budget cap adjustment to create an account that would receive between $2.1 billion and $2.9 billion per year, beginning in fiscal year 2020 and ending in 2027. The amount placed in the account would increase by $100 million each year. Federal firefighting agencies could tap into the account after their normal firefighting accounts were depleted.
From Treesource: https://treesource.org/news/lands/wildfire-funding/#more-1853