LONGVIEW — The 2021 version of a bill to fund wildfire and forest health in Washington state is different from its predecessors, according to Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz.
In an interview with TDN, Franz said the new approach to funding reflects a new urgency to “move at the pace of fire” and to build resilient communities in the wake of the devastating fires of 2020.
“Three out of the last four years have been catastrophic fire seasons,” she said. “Hope is not going to prevent these wildfire and luck won’t put them out.”
Last year’s bill focused on wildfire repression and forest restoration, but Franz told TDN that “after witnessing the destruction of Malden, it was clear we had to incorporate community resilience.”
Franz said the need for resilience was emphasized as she walked through the fire-ravaged town this summer, she came across a home that was “completely untouched.”
“It wasn’t luck,” Franz said. “The homeowners had taken steps to create defensible space around the home. We need to do that around neighborhoods, create fuel breaks and give the communities a chance to protect themselves.”
The bill, HB1168, would create dedicated funding account of $125 million each biennium for wildfire response, forest restoration and community resilience. The bill, which was crafted by a coalition of firefighters, tribes, environmentalists, public health advocates and forest products companies, moved out of the Rural Development, Agriculture & Natural Resources committee last week and will have an appropriations hearing on Feb. 16.
The bill gained strong bipartisan support in committee, with 12 of the 15 members in favor of it including District 20 House Rep. Ed Orcutt (R-Kalama). Orcutt, who studied fire ecology in college, said the bill’s policies would go a long way toward fixing decades of forest mismanagement.
“Wildfire is an issue we really need to deal with in this state,” he said. “The problem has been building for a long time and we’ve know for a long time.”
District 19 House Rep. Joel McEntire (R-Cathlamet) is also on the committee, and he voted to move the bill forward with no recommendation because he “supports the essence of the bill” but thinks there could be improvements. Mostly, he wants to know where the money will come from.
“Most bills that come through the legislature are good-intentioned, but we really have to know what costs are going to be incurred,” McEntire said.
He said there’s “no question that it’s a bill that we need,” and he hopes to see positive changes in it as it moves through the process.
Orcutt said similar past bills proposed funding from an added tax to homeowners insurance, which he found “worrying” and was a sticking point in passing the bills. Orcutt said he would prefer the money come from existing revenue streams, because that’s where the rising cost of fighting fires is coming from.
“It should be an investment from the general fund that will provide savings in a few years instead of taxing people,” he said.
Franz said work is still going on behind the scenes to identify where the money might come from, but “as I traveled the state and talked with legislators, from the East and West, Republican and Democrat, House and Senate, it was continuously made clear to me that everybody agrees on the ‘what’: we have to invest more in fire response, forest resilience and community resilience,” she said. “The debate doesn’t sit there. The debate is focused more on the ‘how.’ How are we going to pay for it?”
The new bill also focuses more on developing a workforce that can help manage Washington’s vast forests.
There’s a shortage of trained foresters to do health assessments, run prescribed burns and restore damaged sections of forests, Franz said. Public and private entities all have the same need, and with COVID-19 pushing unemployment rates skyward, the Department of Natural Resources wants to “help build our foresters of the future,” Franz said.
In that way, the state can take a crisis and turn it into an opportunity for the environment and the economy, Franz said.
The bill lays out funding to hire new firefighters, buy firefighting aircraft and fire detection technology, provide support for local fire districts, build fuel breaks around at-risk communities and give direct assistance to homeowners to create defensible space on their property.
Franz said overall, the bill addresses the fact that “we’re clearly relied for too long on luck and hope instead of funding comprehensive wildfire strategy.”
“Catastrophic” fires are no longer the anomaly, she said, and every year more acreage burns. While fires used to be more or a risk on the eastern side of the Cascades, drier conditions and hotter temperatures have put the western Cascades area at nearly as much of a risk.
In the Labor Day firestorm last year, Franz said in 72 hours 600,000 acres burned — five times the amount of acreage in all of 2019’s fire season and half of the 2015 fire season.
Franz said the current limited resources and maxed out skeleton crews aren’t enough.
“We need funding to invest in firefighting resources and equipment,” she said. “We need to invest in forest health, which can change the trajectory and give the forest a fighting chance because they can fight fires on their own if they’re heathy and resilient. And we need to get resources to communities on the front lines.”
Making forests resilient means returning to a time hundreds of year ago when fire burned through forests regularly enough to remove dead and weak trees and give larger trees less competition, Franz said.
“If you looked back 100-plus years, you would see the forest we had then did not look like the forest does now,” she said. “Fire would come in and remove weak trees and diseased trees, leaving more space and less competition for resources. As a result … everything was healthier. We’re trying to replicate those conditions and get back to a forest that is healthy enough to fight fires by itself.”
That way, she said, when fires do break out they would be 100 acres instead of 100,000.
Foresters do that by going in and manually removing dead limbs and thinner trees to prevent fire from reaching the crowns of mature trees, as well as setting controlled burns when the conditions are safe.
That work started in 2017, and Franz said over 2 million acres have been assessed and about 250,000 treated since 2017. The Department of Natural Resources’ goal in its forest plan is to treat 70,000 acres a year for next 20 years, but Franz would like to speed that pace up.
“We put forward HB1168 with the goal to do everything we can to make sure the Evergreen State does not turn charcoal black,” Franz said.
