Posted on 05/13/2007 10:01:54 AM PDT by Knitting A Conundrum
The money for fighting forest fires is coming from the very program needed to thin the fuels that increase the size and cost of fires.
The Bush administration's decision to force the U.S. Forest Service to pay to fight forest fires out of its budget has created a funding crisis. It has brought back attention to how to pay for the agency that manages 193 million acres of national forest, including 20 million in Idaho.
In the past decade, Congress has cut more than 5,000 employees from the Forest Service, more than half. This year, the Bush administration has proposed cutting $64 million out of the agency's $4.1 billion budget and another 2,100 jobs.
The last five chiefs of the Forest Service have written Congress warning that the current status is not sustainable. And former warriors in the timber wars that all but ended logging — the major source of funding — on the national forests are talking about remarkably similar ideas for carrying out the restoration both sides say is necessary.
(Excerpt) Read more at idahostatesman.com ...
Fewer employees, fewer $ and lots of lawyer fees to try to get anything done. More fires, and more complicated fires. Fewer fire fighting staff, too. New Chief of the FS and others trying to find solutions to funding and forest restoration.
Article talks about options the new chief and others are discussing on how to fund this.
News story related to wildland fire fighting you might be interested in.
Do you think he cut the funding to force the FS to sell, I don’t know, timber? ;)
$80 is a bit steep, but they are handy to have and avoids paying entrance fees at National Forest, National Parks, BLM and similar federal lands. Sorta like buying a duck stamp, even if ya don’t hunt ducks???
It is more natural to allow trees to burn than it is to cut them for the lumber. Besides this way we can import lumber and that helps the global ecomony.
You need to support global economics and quit being selfish, concerned with America first.
Well, if they are not part of the National Guard and not deployable, stop your whining for if you get YOUR way a lot more than just jobs could be lost.
When will people see the reality?
Lest we forget, federal revenues after the well deserved tax cuts to individuals (gasps to the liberal minded) have increased.
If you ever been where you can’t see 6 inches in front of your face, start hearing jets & trains screaming treetop level over your head, and be looking for a big deep creek to go jump in; you’d believe more in spending money; you watermellon greenie,,,,,,,
They (congress in particular) want blood from turnips. Something for nothing. The only people benefitting are lawyers....Logging communities suffer, the environment suffers, the FS gets sued because it can’t do certain maintenance things because it spends all its money doing wildfire work, because that is underfunded, and fewer and fewer people are available for the management positions in fighting fires (and you can’t be an incident commander unless you are a government employee). And there are very few young staff being trained to do these jobs nowadays because there are very few young staff in the federal government period, because they are contract jobs nowadays, managed by private companies, and those people don’t get freed to work wildfire assignments.
This year, they are already having trouble with getting just the southern fires fully staffed. Once the west starts to burn, and it’s a crispy west this year, it’s going to get worse.
A different funding approach is overdue.
I clicked thru to the aticle - it seemed to say that the firefighting was historically funded by logging revenues, until they got sued out of business.
I think the message is, no logging, no firefighting.
This gets easyer everyday. Take the money going to peanut farmers and spinach farmers and use it for the fire departments. Take it form all the pork in Congress.
The FS was set up originally to protect watersheds and preserve timberlands.
Firefighting was always part of its mandate.
Without watersheds, you are in a heap of trouble.
This is not something that can yet be handled by the national guard nor fully by the private sector because of the professional level of knowledge required and the seasonalness of the work.
If you can figure out how to create a cadre of professionally trained fire management people who work about 6 months of the year and keep them paid enough to do the work, there are people I know who would love to hear your plan, because they are losing folks to do this work, and there is no alternative staffing plan in the works yet, and the wise ones are pulling their hair, trying to figure out what to do.
Wildland firefighting and taking care of the lands, particularly for its watershed, resource and habitat is something akin to national defense. It’s necessary and it costs $$$. You can only privatize so much of it.
Bingo!
Without a revenue stream, no firefighting. It costs money.
Logging is also useful as a land management technique.
Gosh, I apologize for my lack of vision promoted by my selfish attitude based upon digging 6" into my yard and hitting water or being stifled by hitting water because of the root of a tree here in Minnesota.
I am still free and am relentless with my attitude of focus on more pertinent issues...
EG
“watermellon greenie”
LOL, that’s a new one. hahahaha.
I have a hunch that we are going to be breathing lots of smoke in my neighborhood this summer. I probably should get the Forestry folks tuned in on my scanner. I imagine that they’ll be busy trying to keep the ranch fields from going up in smoke.
Southern California has been burning all winter long. Times a comin’ for the North end to go up in smoke too.
>no logging, no firefighting.<
Thanks to the UN and the damn tree huggers.
...........But, oh the world will be so pretty when they’re done.
Ah, but if I wanted to hit water, I’d have to dig a lot further...and your part of the world has some large fires from time to time as it is...like the one by Boundary Waters right now...
Even in areas we normally think of as wet, things can burn like the dickens.
There are 24 large fires burning in Florida and Georgia right now. The fires have a total of 1011 “overhead” people on them (who do everything from tracking who checks into fire camp so people get paid right to the guys who direct the fire campaigns). There around 200 guys cutting line, 274 engines, (approximately 1100 people) 33 helicopters with their crews, and 4 air tankers with their crews. Around 2500 people, plus the people that are hired to do things like food supply and clerical work. Many of these people are well trained, too, not just guys cutting the overbrush until they hit mineral dirt.
They don’t tell ya how much it’s screwing up local ecosystems, either...Better to let the ecosystem get screwed than let one stick be sold to a timber mill...
Years ago I had a tree hugger tell me how “natural” fires were compared to cutting in roads and clear cutting the trees out.
I asked her if she had ever looked at the creeks or rivers in a fire area after the first rain. When I told her about the fallen trees and the brush build up it didn’t seem to phase her at all because it was “natural”.
This was one of those twits that thought hunting should be banned too but the burnt carcasses of animals was “natural”.
My tagline fits these idiots so well.
Not so easy since the U.S. Forest Service, although an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is not funded through the USDA but through the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The feds will probably have to bail out CT and CA public pension accounts too.
Feds will bail out 'sub-prime' lenders and purchasers.
They think thy've got trouble now??
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