Dear Congressmen Rahall, Dicks and Grijalva:

The National Association of State Foresters (NASF) would like to congratulate you on the introduction of H.R. 5541, the Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act (FLAME Act). We share and support your intent and pursuit to find an alternative to the current emergency wildland fire suppression mechanisms that have a crippling impact on the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Department of the Interior (DOI). The FY09 President’s budget proposes debilitating cuts to the State & Private Forestry programs, which are a direct result of the escalating suppression costs on the Agencies budgets.

The FLAME Act is a strong, positive stride towards finding a solution for the increasing impact of emergency wildland suppression activities on the USFS and DOI. The creation of a federal fund to deal with catastrophic, emergency wildland fire events will help the agencies fulfill their other forest related missions. Further, it will relieve the strain on the USFS and DOI’s annual agency budgets if the emergency funds are not continued to be scored against the agencies. Currently, federal agencies must fund emergency suppression activity costs, undertaken to protect lives, property and natural and cultural resources, by taking funds from other agency programs. The Flame Act partitions the emergency suppression spending from the USFS and DOI budgets, which partially alleviates the pressure.

The FLAME Act is an important first step, however, the budgetary structure of the Forest Service must also be considered. In order to truly resuscitate the agencies’ ability to invest in all key programs and functions, a commitment to fund both the emergency FLAME fund, and important USFS programs, is paramount. For wildland fire issues to be adequately addressed, hazardous fuel reduction, forest restoration and community fire assistance need to receive proportional investments as fire suppression currently receives.

The USFS previously committed to increasing cost-containment activities on wildland fire events and due to those activities, the Agency spent less than was estimated on fire suppression activities last year. This dedication is important to reducing the overall cost of fire suppression activities. The FLAME Act contains provisions on cost-containment and we urge you to look at expanding those money-saving requirements within this legislation. NASF believes that expanding the cost-containment provision is an important step in solving the ever-increasing wildland fire suppression costs.

NASF further urges Congress and the Administration to recognize that additional investments in federal and state wildland fire management agency budgets, separate from emergency and ‘normal’ suppression needs, are key to creating a long-term budget solution. The creation of the FLAME fund alone will not resolve the problem; the budget formulation issues forced by a constrained Agency budget must also be addressed.

We believe this issue of finding a budgetary fix to funding wildfire suppression expenditures is the paramount issue of the day and that the FLAME Act is the right opening push. The House Agriculture Committee has also demonstrated a commitment to working on a comprehensive fix to this important issue, and we are confident that by working with our Congressional partners together we shall produce the soundest solution to this daunting problem. Thank you for your leadership on this issue and for the introduction of the FLAME Act.

Sincerely,

Kirk Rowdabaugh

NASF President