Senate Committee Hears Expert Testimony On Federal Wildfire Management

By Carrie Jung
Published: Tuesday, May 5, 2015 - 4:10pm
(Photo courtesy of U.S. Forest Service)
Slide Fire in May 2014.

Forest Service officials are forecasting that fire suppression this year will cost between $800 million and $1.6 billion. The availability of that funding and how it’s allocated was among the discussions in a Senate Natural Resources Committee hearing Tuesday.

Expert witnesses covered a variety of topics in the hearing from watershed protection to expanding the landscape that forest restoration reaches.

Watershed and fire analyst Bob Eisele added that policies like the National Environmental Policy Act are causing excessive delays due to lots of red tape.

"People are gaming the system on NEPA," he said. "NEPA is a good system and we need to be doing it. But we’re not building a shopping center or freeway, we’re mitigating the damage to the forests."

With another above-average fire season anticipated this year, Forest Service leaders also expressed concern that much of the federal land management funding will go to fighting fire rather than preventing it.