Can money stop the smoke, flames that annually ravage WA, now including Pierce County?
East Pierce Fire & Rescue Chief Bud Backer remembers getting to the bottom of the hill in the middle of the night. His crews had already spent hours battling a fire along state Route 167 and another in Milton.
Now, Backer was looking straight at the Sumner Grade Fire, as it began scorching land near state Route 410. Eventually, the fire would consume hundreds of acres and multiple homes.
Last week, Backer described the jumping flames he saw that night as “like nothing I’ve ever seen on this side of the state.”
“I think surprise would probably be putting it lightly. Shocked is probably more of an appropriate term,” Backer said. “It’s not a typical fire for this side of the state, or it has not been.”
The obvious acknowledgment — that the yearly threat of catastrophic wildfire has become a reality that the state must deal with — is a big reason Backer hopes this year is different at the state capitol in Olympia.
Like many across Washington — including on this side of the mountains, where events like the Sumner Grade fire have helped us realize the local danger — Backer wants 2021 to be the year the state Legislature creates a permanent funding source for the state Department of Natural Resources to fight and prevent devastating wildfires.
If it passes, House Bill 1168 would do just that.
The latest proposal out of Commissioner of Public Lands Hillary Franz’s office aimed at this objective, the bill would pump roughly $125 million each biennium into wildfire response. The money would pay for fighting fires, forest management and efforts to make sure communities threatened by wildfires are better prepared.
Wildfires happen, but there are steps the state can take to prevent them from becoming major blazes, Backer says, and resources we can put in place to better fight them.
Without such a proactive pledge from the Legislature, there will likely be many more catastrophic fires to come, Backer said.
He’s right, and it’s a possibility that should be enough to frighten any Pierce County resident.
“If we’re going to say preparation is one of the fixes to our wildfire problem,” Backer argued,” then we better figure out a way to get that done.”
While increasing funding to prevent and fight wildfires enjoys bipartisan support in Olympia, recent history suggests an agreement over how to pay for it won’t come easily.
Last year, a similar effort — which relied on a home insurance surcharge to raise the money — fizzled. It wasn’t the first such failure.
This time around, the bill that recently passed out of the House Committee on Appropriations attempts to remove that potential sticking point, according to Franz.
HB 1168 simply lays out the need and asks elected officials to figure out how to pay for it, she said.
“With every issue in Olympia, when it comes to how something will be funded, there’s disagreement, and it falls oftentimes along party lines. So this year we took a different approach,” Franz said. “Since there is largely universal agreement around the what, let’s work with (the Legislature) during the session to identify the how.”
For Franz, a Democrat who was reelected last year, creating a dedicated funding source for wildfire response has been a top priority. In its absence, her agency has been forced to make due with piecemeal, reactionary funding and prayers to battle the large blazes, she said.
Last year, 812,000 acres of Washington forest burned, Franz noted, while hundreds of homes and buildings were destroyed and a 1-year-old boy was killed in the Cold Springs Fire in Okanogan County. Choking smoke contributed to the Pacific Northwest notching the worst air quality in the world.
At the same time, man-made climate change has upped the ante, according to experts.
Franz said her proposal would dedicate more than $70 million each biennium into wildfire response — in the form of more firefighters and equipment upgrades — while committing more than $50 million a biennium to forest restoration and community preparedness.
The bill also would provide the investment needed to fully fund DNR’s 20-year forest health strategic plan, she noted, which calls for restoring natural wildfire resistance on 1.25 million acres of federal, state, private and tribal land.
Franz said that would mean strengthening the health of forests by clearing underbrush and the dense, dry fuel that currently sits on the forest floor. To accomplish this, efforts like bush removal, forest thinning and controlled burns would be used, according to DNR.
Even though some money has been put toward forest maintenance in recent years, it hasn’t been nearly enough to attack the problem proactively, Franz believes. From 2013 to 2018, Washington paid an average of $153 million annually to battle blazes. If the state wants to respond to the crisis instead of simply reacting every year, it will require money the agency can count on, she said.
“Right now, we’re fighting our fires with hope and luck,” Franz said. “Frankly, we can’t put fires out based on hope, and we can’t prevent them based on luck.”
All this leaves is the politics, which — as always — is where things get complicated.
House Minority leader JT Wilcox, R-Yelm, said that establishing a dedicated fund for state wildfire response is a both a personal priority and a priority for his caucus.
Protecting Washington’s forests — and the natural resource economy — makes sense, Wilcox argued.
He also believes it’s a goal that can be accomplished without new revenue, noting that the effort was fully funded in state Republicans’ recent budget proposals.
“This is a big deal to me,” Wilcox said. “(Franz) isn’t asking for crazy things. These are normal practices for the most part in the timber industry, and you do it because there is a solid financial payoff.”
Democratic Speaker of the House Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, was equally adamant about the need, describing it as “a serious issue” that’s aligned with her party’s pledge to take action to address climate change.
Like Wilcox, Jinkins predicted the hurdle would be paying for it. She was skeptical of the idea it could be done without increasing revenue and left open the possibility that the funding might come in chunks or that full implementation might be delayed.
“At this point, we have agreement about the policy being important, and I think we’re still exploring how to pay for it,” Jinkins said. “Everyone is going to have to give something to try to figure it out.”
Backer, meanwhile, said he doesn’t care what it takes. He also doesn’t have much time for partisan political debate about the role of man-made climate change.
The threat is real, he said, which is why he’s hoping to see a different outcome this year.
“If we had the resources, we might have been able to keep (the Sumner Grade Fire) from jumping Highway 410,” Backer said, recalling how the effort to fight the large blaze were hindered by the need to share helicopters.
“We need to be ready to respond to those events, and we need to start working on preventing those events as much as we can,” Backer said.
This story was originally published February 24, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
