Put Another Log on the Fire

 Krayton Kerns
6.25.08 

For the past nine months the Fire Suppression Interim Committee has been studying campfires…great big 100,000 acre campfires.  Due to the exploding cost of fighting Montana wildland fires, eleven other legislators and I have been tasked to find ways to fight fire other than suffocating it with taxpayer dollars.  (The last fire season took over $100 million one-dollar bills to smother the flames.)  

We met four times in Helena, and then traveled to Hamilton, Lewistown, Miles City, Seeley Lake, Thompson Falls, and Libby to collect public input.  After gathering hundreds of pages of public testimony, the expensive wildland fire problem boils down to two causes:  

1.      We have a problem with fuel over-load.

2.      We are in a drought. 

The elimination of either one of the above points negates the other, so the solution to the rising cost of fighting wild fires should be relatively simple and…non-partisan.  Such is not the case and here is what is developing: 

Left-leaning committee members feel every problem can be solved with higher taxation and greater regulation.  To them the high cost of fighting wildfire is due to the high cost of protecting structures built in the wildland-urban interface (WUI).  With many Montanans escaping the intrinsic problems of city life by moving to the country, the tax and regulation side offer solutions like:

         1.      State wide zoning to dictate exactly where and how you will build your country home.

         2.      Creation of a tax on homeowner insurance policies to fund firefighting costs.

         3.      Imposition of a tax on all property in the WUI to fund firefighting efforts.

         4.      Creation of a tax on all property in the undeveloped portion of the WUI.  (This tax was proposed to discourage people from moving even further out into the country.)

         5.      And, of course, institute a carbon emission cap-n-trade program to stop global warming, and thus the drought. 

Right-leaning committee members (me and probably two others) view the solution from a lower taxes, self reliance and resource development perspective; here is what I think: 

1. You make the decision where and how to build your house. If you chose natural cedar siding, with a cedar shake roof nestled up against beetle-killed pine trees, don’t expect the taxpayer to run to your house with wheelbarrows of money when a passing wildland fire burns it down.  We live in Montana, not New Orleans.

2. Fires don’t burn any hotter if they are burning houses versus timber so the presence of homes in the WUI does not affect the intensity of a catastrophic fire.  Zoning isn’t the answer.

3. We have a fuel overload problem.  For sixty years we have been aggressively suppressing fire on the national forest while at the same time environmentalists have halted our timber harvest…when they weren’t busy halting our domestic crude oil development. As an example, the Kootenai National Forest plans to harvest 50 million board feet of timber from northwest Montana every year.  Unfortunately, last year they cut around 20 million with the remaining harvest tied up in court. Meanwhile, Mother Nature adds 400 million board feet of new timber to the Kootenai every year.  While we fiddle in court, Montana logging families go broke while the forest fuel load grows bigger and bigger. The solution is simple; either we log it or it will burn. 

The Fire Suppression Committee will meet in August to debate the above points.  From that discussion legislation may be drafted for consideration by the ’09 legislature.  Ultimately, the voters of Montana will make the final decision through their selection of the legislators they send to Helena.  Will it be “tax and spend and regulate” or “freedom, self-reliance and development of our natural resources”.  It is your choice, vote wisely.