Wildfire budgets not optional

Inter Lake editorial

Come on, Congress! Do something to fix the U.S. Forest Service's incredibly inefficient method of covering the costs of fighting wildfires.

Democrats blame Senate filibusters and President Bush's veto pen for "obstruction," while Republicans blame the Democratic majorities for parliamentary trickery to avoid advancement of any meaningful legislation.

Whatever. Congress has record-low public approval ratings because it simply does not take care of the country's most pressing business.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that after two decades of record keeping, no Congress has passed fewer laws at this point in the session - only 294 so far. Some may consider that a blessing, but there are some things the nation's lawmakers shouldn't be ignoring or deferring, especially for the sake of political advantage.

The Forest Service's all too frequent "fire transfer" situation is one of those things, a basic housekeeping duty that shouldn't be subjected to partisan gridlock.

Across the country, Forest Service staffers are once again scrambling to find money to cover firefighting costs that are expected to reach an all-time high of $1.9 billion for the year. That exceeds the agency's fire budget by about $700 million, an amount that must be lifted from a variety of program budgets intended to pay for basic operations such as roads, trails, campgrounds, facilities and, ironically, fuel reduction projects aimed at curbing the potential for large wildfires.

This has happened five times in the last nine summers, including the last three in a row. It is an incredibly wasteful way of doing business, if one considers that projects are planned across the country, and the entire agency comes to a lurching halt. Staffs at the district, forest and regional levels find themselves spending time and energy simply coming up with money for firefighting efforts that often occur far away. This year, the Flathead National Forest was charged with finding $900,000 from its program budgets, mostly to pay for an extremely intense fire season in California.

Earlier this year, Congress was on the verge of developing a solution, legislation that would have established an "off-budget" emergency funding account for fighting fires, similar to the

way the government covers the costs of hurricanes, flooding and other natural disasters.

Unfortunately, and not so surprisingly, the legislation was watered down at the last minute to a point where it would no longer effectively address the problem.

This is ridiculous. Sometimes it's understandable when lawmakers have standoffs over major policy issues. But empowering the federal government to operate efficiently should be a fundamental, non-partisan goal for Congress.