Editorial: Good news, bad news in California battle against wildfires

Surprise. The $1.3 trillion budget deal passed by Congress and signed by President Trump last week has good news for California — sort of.

It sets aside an additional $2 billion per year for 10 years to fight wildfires, ending the nonsensical practice of borrowing from the U.S. Forest Service’s prevention budget when firefighting funds run out. Give Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, credit for pushing the deal through the House and Senate.

But — this is Congress and the White House, so there’s almost always a but — the budget includes only an extra $500 million for this fiscal year. House Speaker Paul Ryan fought to keep the full funding from being available until 2020, meaning the Forest Service and California will probably face budget shortfalls during the 2018 and 2019 wildfire seasons.

Ryan was OK with pumping up the military budget to $700 billion in 2018, but he balked at adding the $2 billion in firefighting funds for fear that it would push spending levels beyond the cap approved by Congress earlier this year.

Go figure.

The wine country fires alone last fall killed 44 people, destroyed nearly 9,000 buildings and homes and cost an estimated $3 billion in damage. All told, California spent almost $1.8 billion last year fighting major wildfires.

Most of that money will ultimately be paid by the federal government’s Forest Service budget. And when the service’s funds for fighting wildfires run out, it must turn to its fire prevention money to fill the gap.

This approach begs for a new strategy.

Congress and the president should treat wildfires as natural disasters and fund fighting them through the same program that deals with earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. This approach would allow the Forest Service to know in advance how much money it would have available for prevention and put it where needed most.

Without predictable money for prevention, the damage will only get worse. Climate change is lengthening the fire season throughout the West. The Forest Service spent what was a record $1.7 billion fighting wildfires in 2015. That number jumped to $2 billion in 2016 and to $2.6 billion in 2017. This year’s lack of rainfall and a depleted snowpack will likely make the summer’s challenge even greater.

It’s not just that firefighting will cost more, blazes will do greater damage. California recorded 1,000 more wildfires in 2017 than in 2016. The Forest Service reports that fire seasons now are on average 78 days longer than in 1970. The extended fire seasons have resulted in doubling the number of acres burned for the past three decades. And Forest Service scientists believe it will likely double again by 2050.

Fires destroy our natural resources, but they also take lives. President Trump, in signing the budget bill, said keeping Americans safe is his top priority. That thinking should apply to defending against the threat of wildfires as much as from those who would do us harm.

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