Fire and Fuels

This is a guest post from Frank Carroll.  I think it’s a good illustration of specific concerns that people (including some TSW readers) have about a specific fire.

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I was taking a look at a more recent Taxpayers for Common report on wildfire (to be posted later) and ran across this report from 2002.  The title is Wildfire: Just the Facts.

1. During the 2002 wildfire season:

• 2.4 million acres of Forest Service and burned, in addition to 4.8 million acres of other federal, state, and private land.
• Firefighting costs reached a record-breaking $1.6 billion.
• 2,381 structures were lost.
• Over 30,000 people were involved with firefighting efforts, including firefighters and support personnel.

2. Decades of fire suppression have actually increased the risk of wildfire, especially in forests that experienced frequent low-intensity fires that cleared out undergrowth. Wildfires are a natural part of many forest ecosystems, thus some wildfires should be allowed to burn within certain limits. Human safety and the protection of property and natural resources should remain priorities.

3. Funds spent on fire preparedness directly reduce the amount spent on fire suppression. According to the Forest Service, every $1 spent on fire preparedness decreases suppression costs by $5-$7.

4. According to the General Accounting Office, the Forest Service relies on the commercial timber sale program to reduce wildfire risk and tends to concentrate on forests with high-value timber rather than those facing the greatest risk. Also, fire-risk reduction projects are judged based on the number of acres treated, leading to the treatment of the cheapest areas, as opposed to those that are at the highest risk.

I’d say that the first statement is not true anymore, the second still a topic of concern.

5. Commercial logging can increase the risk of wildfire. Logging removes large, green, fire-resistant trees leaving behind smaller fire-prone trees; opens the forest canopy which leads to drier forests that are more susceptible to fire; and leaves behind flammable materials (i.e. twigs, branches and needles) that increase the rate of fire spread.

I don’t think that this was a “fact” then.. I guess it has to do with the “can” in the bold versus the plain old statements in the rest “logging removes” not “can remove.”

6. Congress gives the Forest Service a “blank check” when it comes to firefighting and does not even try to set a realistic budget for fire suppression. Congress has always reimbursed the agency for any and all costs.

Perhaps fire borrowing came and went since 2002.

7. Fifty-six percent of all National Forests lack approved fire management plans, which were required by the 1995 Federal Wildland Fire Policy. These plans outline what will and will not be done in the event of a wildfire, and the lack of such plans can actually make it harder and more expensive to fight wildfires. Because of the blank-check funding for fire suppression, the Forest Service has little incentive to try to reduce costs through the implementation of these plans.

What are these? Were they really required? Does every Forest have one now? What’s the difference between a fire management plan and a fire plan amendment?

I certainly don’t know, but some folks sent me links to this article in the Nevada Globe with that title. It’s by a reporter named Dana Tibbitts who has also written a three part series called “license to burn: wildfire as the ultimate public-private partnership.”

Now we know that different folks here have views on all sides of this issue here at TSW so this may lead to a good discussion.

Indeed, the Chief’s “Burn Back Better” letter has caused a firestorm among firefighters and Forest Service veterans nationwide.

“We ain’t seen nothing yet,” said one fire veteran in response to the letter. “The USFS is doubling down. The Chief’s claim of a ‘historic achievement of 4.3 million acres of restoration’ prioritizes rampant ‘Wildfire Use’ over a strong ‘Initial Attack’ to put the fire out from the get-go. It’s also a misappropriation of congressionally appropriated funds allocated to the agency for emergency fire suppression.” 

Last year was a reprieve,” National Wildfire Institute (NWI) sources say. “Forest maintenance is down, so acres burned will likely increase. It’s only May 22, and about two million acres have already burned. Look for about eight million acres to burn in the 2024 fire season as a strong ‘Initial Attack’ policy gives way to a ‘managed’ or ‘beneficial’ fire. If history is a guide, the West will bear the brunt.”

I couldn’t find out much about the National Wildfire Institute via Google searching. I know TSWites know more about this group, so hopefully you will provide links below.

The colossal fiascoes of the Caldor, Tamarack, and Dixie fires of 2021 are case in point. These fires were allowed to run for months, consuming almost 1.3 million acres of Sierra Nevada forest. The costs of Caldor Fire damages alone ran in the billions of dollars, not including trees and wildlife lost, or damages to 1,200 residents displaced from their homes.

Burning an average of more than six million acres a year over the last decade is now a standing order for the USFS, not only in California but across the nation. The wholesale use of “managed” or “prescribed” fire under the guise of firefighter safety, forest health, and resilience and restoration, is scarring landscapes, devastating forests, and leaving vast lifeless ecosystems with few signs of recovery.

This sounds more like an op-ed than reporting- but then that’s fairly common today.  Anyway, here’s a local fire chief with concerns:

Tahoe-Douglas Fire Chief and head of the Northern Nevada Fire Chiefs Association, Scott Lindgren said, “The latest forecast and guidance from the Chief is so unhinged from firefighting realities on the ground as to defy rational analysis or practical guidance.”

USFS Regional Foresters are deploying a new policy, calling for all fires in the Tahoe Basin to be risk-assessed and monitored by USFS Regional Foresters, who alone would determine the appropriate response to new fire ignitions.

Lindgren rejects the idea. “It’s a non-starter. If a fire in the Basin threatens my jurisdiction or community, we’re not going to wait around. We’ll hit every fire hard and direct with everything we’ve got. Managed fire is not an option. Look at Caldor and Tamarack. We need to put fires out immediately.”

“The USFS decision to allow these fires to burn is criminal,” Lindgren added. “I’m very disturbed that, by allowing these fires to burn like they did in the Tamarack Fire, they get to count those acres as ‘treated.’ These are not treated acres—they are destroyed acres!”

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When Fire Chief Lindgren testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources in 2022, he raised concerns about Chief Moore’s LOI continuing to advocate the catastrophic burn policy, even after the Caldor and Tamarack fire debacles.

“Many local fire chiefs were very upset,” Lindgren testified. “So, we wrote our own letter of intent, which we believe reflects the public’s expectations and demands of us.” Over 30 chiefs in California and Nevada sign the letter annually.

“We will aggressively attack all fires within or threatening our jurisdictions. We will hit them as fast and hard as possible when they are small. In these unprecedented conditions, we can’t afford the risk to our public, our communities, the environment, the wildlife, critical infrastructure, or our firefighters by letting these fires grow out of control. We will use every available resource and tool to keep this from happening…We will find a way to get ahead of it and stop it at all costs,” Lindgren stated.

“Why can’t the USFS take a similar stance?” Lindgren asked. “Burn Back Better isn’t working.”

The Biden-Harris administration’s plan to Burn Back Better, detailed in Confronting the Wildfire Crisis, lays out a 10-year plan to treat (code for burn) 20 million acres of National Forest System lands, 30 million acres of other Federal, State, Tribal, and private lands, and an additional 10-million-acre targeted burn. That’s a whopping 60 million acres of unauthorized, ill-conceived, unilateral burn treatments for America’s forests, rangelands, and Wildland Urban Interface communities—all in the name of so-called science, resilience and restoration.

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My understanding is that the treatments in the plan include prescribed fire, mechanical treatments, and managed fire.. does anyone know if those categories are broken out in reporting?  Last time I had to dig out the managed fire from a budget statement.

I followed the link to Lindgren’s testimony..and here he is on pay and benefits:

There has been some great work done on State and private land in the Basin. But work on the USFS land is inconsistent and sloppy. This is not the fault of the USFS Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, but more so due to lake of funding and lack of staffing. The pay and benefits for the USFS are incredibly deficient and frankly embarrassing. They have massive trouble recruiting and retaining employees. The good employees that they do have are very dedicated, but can only do so much. I have heard the promises in this year’s budget
to fix their pay and benefits, but from what I have recently heard from some of their employees, they have not seen any change. Why? They deserve to be paid what the state and local
government fire departments make. Until the pay and benefits are fixed, you won’t fix the problem. I urge you to fix their pay and benefits ASAP.

Of course, Lindgren’s testimony was in 2022; I haven’t been keeping track of whether pay and benefits (and housing) have been fixed or  not.

Right now in the wildfire space, we have many new folks entering from the political and philanthropic world. How should we welcome them gracefully to what has been historically our space? How would we like them to work with us? I myself have felt territorial from time to time; and yet, these people have far more money and political power than our own communities, so the better we work together the better off we will be. They’ve got new and different ideas from many of us in this space, and they well may be good ideas!  In some cases, they have ideas about how to deal with Climate, and to them, wildfire is one aspect of climate.  We tend to look at wildfires as something we’ve dealt with in various ways (both of thinking and of action)  at least for the last half century- within the memory of TSWites.  Clearly these different perspectives could lead to different framings and different solutions.  We have advantages in terms of knowledge and experience, they have advantages in terms of funding, access to media, and political power.  How can we best work together?

In this series of posts, we’ll take a look at some of the players, their backgrounds and interconnections. Today I’m going to lay some groundwork.

I’m assuming that the new folks have good intentions. But in political world, charitable groups (c3s and 4s) and foundations are not known for transparency. And many of the new players in wildfire space are affiliated with the D political party and/or SIPs (self-identified progressives).  Does their source of funding matter? I’d suggest it does. Not that they are bribed by it, nor that the people funding them are questionable. As the article below argues, Ds as well as Rs have every right to use so-called dark money, since that’s the way the world currently works.

I’m interested in increasing trust in government and making government better; everyone probably agrees with that.  Using dark money, by either party, does not help with that.  I understand the tendency to keep donors secret, but also what they spend their money on seems to be secret.  Lobbying for what exactly? And is anyone checking that the c3s (tax exempt) moving money to c4s are following all the rules (which seem pretty convoluted to me)?

If we were in the New Folks’ shoes, we might foresee a time that our partisanship and our goal of improving wildfire resilience might diverge. Since many fire-prone areas have R politics,  since both parties seem to be around 50% of the population of the country, and since wildfire is going to take long-term investments and coalitions, off the bat, bipartisan solutions seem like the way to go.  And sometimes partisans (on both sides) seem more interested in using issues to gain power than in actually solving real-world problems.

So I want to be very clear that my work to make these folks’ funding and goals more transparent is in the ultimate interests of all of us, to work together toward shared and supported outcomes with minimal Distracting, Expensive and Unnecessary Partisan Drama.  Other concerns include possible tendencies of the New Folks to not interact directly with those in the traditional wildfire space, which could lead to unworkable policy ideas and/or reinventing the wheel.  Hopefully, we can encourage them to work directly with those currently in this space, scientists, practitioners, county and state governments, and so on.

So basically I’m not doing this to pick on Ds- I’m not asking them to do anything different from what I’d ask R’s. It just happens that they are moving in to wildfire space.

I first noticed a few weeks ago that some of the funding for our our new folks (and some newly going to traditional folks in the wildfire space) is indirectly from sources identified with “dark money.” In 2021, Rachel Cohen wrote an interesting article in The American Prospect on dark money and Ds. According to Wikipedia (not always a trusted source) The American Prospect is a magazine from the liberal and SIP perspective. The article has a great explanation of some of the complex context for the lack of transparency, and the concerns that SNPs themselves have with it.  The whole piece is worth a read.

WITH UNION MEMBERSHIP RAPIDLY DECLINING, progressives struggle to counteract the massive power and influence of the corporate lobby. To fill the gap, they turned to tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, of which there are two main kinds, both named for the section of the federal tax code under which they are regulated. 501(c)(3)s, also known as public charities, range from symphonies to the Boy Scouts to (full disclosure) The American Prospect. They can engage only in limited amounts of lobbying, and cannot donate to political campaigns. Financial contributions to c3s also yield donors a tax deduction. 501(c)(4)s—the social welfare groups—provide no tax deduction for contributions, but they can endorse candidates and engage in unlimited lobbying, so long as this doesn’t comprise the majority of their activities. Importantly, they need not disclose their donors.

One doesn’t have to squint to see why dark-money groups are attractive to the rich. The vehicles allow them to donate and avoid the negative attention that might come with disclosing their identities, like protests outside their home or bad press. Anonymity also helps them avoid threats of violence or actual harm, defenders of the status quo like to say. The Philanthropy Roundtable, a conservative advocacy group for charitable giving, says shielding donors from public scrutiny is necessary for “philanthropic freedom.”

While some issues—particularly abortion access—have a real record of harm for supporters, most advocacy groups hide today behind harassment of abortion activists to rationalize their own lack of transparency. Other groups cynically cite a Supreme Court decision from six decades ago that unanimously ordered Alabama to stop accessing the NAACP’s membership list, concluding that doing so interfered with members’ right to freely associate. However, a billionaire donating to a political nonprofit to run anonymous ads against Medicare expansion should not be likened to the legitimate threats Black Americans faced in the South during the civil rights movement.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the lead sponsor of the DISCLOSE Act, says he has no problem with rich donors who want to, say, give discreetly to their alma mater. “There are some good reasons for anonymity, maybe you want to give a big donation to your university and want to avoid other people coming to ask you for money—there’s nothing really wrong with that,” Whitehouse said. “But it’s different when you’re trying to exert political pressure over others and refuse to stand up for your views.”

I’m totally with Whitehouse on that.  At the same time, he is one of the supporters of WEG.. who.. don’t disclose their donors.

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DOES IT REALLY MATTER if liberal political advocacy groups and campaigns disclose their donors, if the house is on fire?

Dorfman thinks that transparency is “helpful to the cause” and that groups should disclose “a great deal of information,” but acknowledged that sometimes donors just don’t want to do that. “I think each organization in the progressive space needs to make that call, on their own within the limits of the law,” he said.

One challenge of hiding donors is that it makes it more difficult for the public to assess which organizations authentically speak for the communities they purport to, and which are just pet projects of the rich or schemes by companies.

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These advocacy groups, and their donors in turn, exert real influence on the priorities of politicians, leading them too often in less populist directions. This isn’t new, and the Democratic Party in particular has been making itself more easily swayed by the whims of the wealthy ever since the early 1980s.

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Political scientists Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol have noted that the structure of these elite donor consortia have potential to influence politics in uniquely powerful ways, even beyond similar partisan super PACs and single-issue advocacy groups.

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My bolds:

The suggestion that wealthy donors on the left never advocate for their economic self-interest doesn’t hold much water, either. The rapid demise of the ambitious and extremely popular redistributive tax proposals in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act suggests who still has the ear of those in power.

“This stuff is so opaque and no one is holding anyone accountable,” said one staffer whose employer works with the venture philanthropy funds. “The organizational landscape of civic and political organizations is just totally being transformed as inequality grows and rich people get uber rich and we are finding more creative ways to distribute their money.”

The staffer, who works in progressive movement building, says the landscape is becoming “extremely donor-centric” in a way that no longer even resembles the industrial-titan philanthropic milieu they once knew. “We’re entering this new era of capitalism dominated by finance, tech, and insurance. The money is different,” they said. “We’ve linked our fates here to new powers within capitalism, and [how] that money is moved, aggregated, pooled, and filters down is really different than even several years ago, and it scares me a little bit.”

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AS PROGRESSIVE GROUPS GROW more dependent on rich donors who’d like to keep their contributions private, liberals find themselves contorting into awkward positions to justify the status quo, insisting groups that are clearly affiliated with the Democratic Party are not, in fact, partisan. Political nonprofits tend to insist they’re independent and simply “issue oriented”—a framing that’s practically dubious but legally necessary to keep their nonprofit status.

This strained logic was on display this past year when The New York Times profiled obscure Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has become one of the top funders of left-leaning organizations, donating hundreds of millions of dollars since 2016 both to entities that distribute funds to other progressive political advocacy groups, and directly to organizations like the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank where Wyss sits on the board. While Wyss does not donate directly to candidates or PACs, the groups benefiting from Wyss’s contributions work to help Democrats and defeat Republicans. Representatives for the billionaire insisted to the Times that his money was not “spent on political campaigning” and was merely “bolster[ing] social welfare programs in the United States.”

With a heavily weakened and embattled IRS, partisan c4s are so confident today that they will face no punishment for engaging too much in political activity that even Majority Forward, a c4 founded in 2015 and affiliated with Senate Democrats, told the Federal Election Commission that it did not receive contributions in 2018 earmarked for political purposes and thus refused to disclose its donors, despite spending more than $45 million that cycle boosting Democrats.

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As to Wyss.. I wrote about him on TSW here (Swiss dude with outsized policy influence).

More recently, I ran across an article from last fall by a fellow in Maine about Wyss:

Wyss is hardly a newcomer to influencing Maine politics — even if he is, as a Swiss foreign national, prohibited under federal law from voting in America or donating to American political campaigns.

Through his $2.7 billion Wyss Foundation, his $232 million Berger Action Fund, the Democracy Alliance’s Democracy Fund, and the Arabella Advisors network of dark money, Wyss has joined other progressive billionaires like George Soros, S. Donald Sussman, and Pierre Omidyar in financing Democratic politicians and progressive activists, in Maine and nationally.

And one in February in Politico:

After the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Berger Action Fund’s next largest beneficiary was the Fund for a Better Future, a dark money group that supports causes like abortion rights, social justice immigration and public health, and is behind the green group Climate Power, which has supported Democratic climate priorities like the Inflation Reduction Act. Fund for a Better Future received $19.8 million from Berger Action Fund in fiscal 2022, down from $20.2 million the year prior.

More about Fund for a Better Future in wildfire space in a later post.

This sounds interesting for those of us interested in wildfire management  2:30 MT today by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium. Below is a screenshot, here is the link to register.

You can click on the above photo once and get a much better view.  The big red blob on the Nevada wildfire map is Spring Creek Nevada.

So I wondered what the landscape looked like for an area with the 100th percentile for wildfire risk.

This is not a critique of Headwaters, as they used the Forest Service’s (and not First Street’s) Wildfire Risk to Communities map.

I think groups who develop maps think that they will be useful.  But I don’t know. It seems like these maps don’t always directly address the problem at hand, in this case, “does a community have hired or volunteer folks available and knowledgeable to apply for federal grants?”.  I know some communities who don’t.. even though conceivably the area is generally fairly well off.  Maybe another solution would be to make the federal granting procedures easier to understand.  I have friends with high capacity who find the processes of applying for grants for wildfire mitigation in their communities to be more difficult and confusing than needs be.. plus State requirements for fed bucks transferred to the State.  It would be interesting for the Forest Service or someone else to commission listening sessions for communities on their tribulations in acquiring funding, coordinating different programs’ requirements, and so on.  Maybe someone has.

Anyway here’s the link.

The sliders (the default is 50%) for the flood and wildfire maps are really important. Here is Moab, Utah, which we might think is fairly well-disposed in terms of economics.

If you go up to 80% of communities, you can find a place like Pagosa Springs

Or a community in my own area, Ellicott, CO

Now Ellicott is, for all practical purposes, a bedroom community for Colorado Springs in El Paso County, which is fairly well off.  And county folks would be staffed to help communities apply for grants.  But are they? Isn’t that the real question? Then there’s the question of what folks in Ellicott would actually do with the grant money, since it’s a grassland.  Plan evacuations? Is Ellicott-only the right scale for that?

Communities need capacity—the staffing, resources, and expertise—to apply for funding, fulfill complex reporting requirements, and design, build, and maintain infrastructure projects over the long term. Many communities simply lack the staff—and the tax base to support staff—needed to apply for federal programs. Communities that put together applications are often outcompeted by higher-capacity, coastal cities. The places that lack capacity are often the places that most need infrastructure investments: places with a legacy of disinvestment including rural communities and communities of color.

Places that receive the most external funding – whether from state and federal programs or philanthropy – often have larger staff, more expertise, and deeper political influence, not necessarily greater merit. Communities that need the most assistance may be the least likely to even submit applications. For the United States to fully adapt to climate-driven threats and bolster aging infrastructure, its programs and policies must account for community capacity.

Where is capacity limited?

To help identify communities with limited capacity, Headwaters Economics created a new Rural Capacity Index. The Index is based on 12 variables that can function as proxies for community capacity. The variables incorporate metrics related to four categories of capacity: local government staff and expertise, institutional capacity, economic opportunity, and education and engagement. (Read more under Data Sources and Methods below.)

Results are available for counties, county subdivisions, communities, and tribal areas in the interactive map below. The tool displays data across the urban-to-rural continuum to illustrate the variability in community capacity across the country. The inclusion of metropolitan communities is necessary to show the comparatively lower capacity that exists in most rural communities.

Why not- call places that low on the economic scale and ask them what their barriers to applying for federal grants are?  For some, being in the 100 years flood plain may not be a concern.

Anyway, their conclusions seem fairly straightforward.

Supporting communities

To achieve the infrastructure and climate adaptation goals in federal programs, funding agencies must consider community capacity. Programs may need to be structured differently and new strategies may need to be created to support under-served and historically disinvested communities.

Using the Index, community capacity can be supported in many ways:

1. Provide direct funding. For communities with low Index scores, eliminate the need for competitive grants, which many lower-capacity communities lack the resources and expertise to apply for and administer. Federal and state programs can identify where the needs are greatest and allocate funding accordingly.
2. Improve access to competitive grants.
   • Allow funding to be used to build capacity—not just used for projects. For example, funding could be used for new staff positions and technical training to support long-term investments.
   • Eliminate or reduce match requirements. City and county budgets in low-capacity communities may not have the revenue to meet matching requirements.
   • Revise requirements for benefit-cost analyses. These technical reports are expensive and highly technical. They often undervalue the benefits of projects in lower-capacity and lower-income communities.
3. Fund technical assistance. Administered by state or federal agencies or by nonprofit partners, technical assistance programs provide expertise in project identification, design, and implementation, as well as assistance in compiling grant proposals.
4. Increase funding for multi-jurisdictional projects. Funding regional projects that leverage urban-rural partnerships can benefit low-capacity communities. This may require investment in regional institutions and organizations that can help coordinate resources and prioritize projects.
5. Address root problems. Low-capacity communities are often economically dependent on farming and other natural resource sectors associated with volatile revenue. By strengthening policies that encourage economic diversification, state and federal policymakers can help communities generate predictable local revenue needed for infrastructure and adaptation.

On the other hand, rather than hiring more people to interpret ever-more complex programs, or regionalizing them out of the community’s direct authority (via “urban-rural partnerships”), how about considering simplifying requirements at the front end.

My thoughts as admittedly a non-Fire person.

* News for me was that “PODS which should be nearly complete in the West”.  I’m not sure the link between their completion and the public knowing where they are is complete.  Would appreciate observations of others.

* I’m also not sure I appreciate this “Our focus must remain on achieving our “Wildfire Crisis Strategy” landscape restoration goals, while fulfilling our leadership role in emergency response.”
I wonder if he meant the same thing as “During this fire season, our priority remains the protection of people, communities, watersheds and wildlife habitat, including old growth, while continuing to work toward our landscape restoration goals.” I’m not as sensitive about this as some people are, but if I lived closer to a National Forest, I probably would be. “Emergency response” sounds kind of vague.. I’d like to see human lives, homes, communities have higher prominence (although I know with fire-fighters they do). Maybe that’s just the bureaucratic writer in me.

*I also do wish the Forest Service would determine what counts as good fire versus bad fire, as otherwise if the FS believes managed wildfire is good and promotes it, “Increasingly, we see the potential for fire to increase landscape resilience when conditions permit” and our climate/wildfire folks see only total acres burned, they are likely to attribute the increased acres to climate change.

Below is the letter text, and here is a link.

Last year we significantly progressed toward achieving many of our top Agency priorities; I’m proud of the efforts of each and every employee. The tremendous achievements of 2023 set the stage for a promising 2024. Our collective commitment and resilience turned vision into action.  We faced challenges head-on, with significant contributions from employees, at all levels, at home and abroad. Our historic achievement to treat over 4.3 million acres of hazardous fuels underscores our dedication to accelerate strategic investments and intentionally allocate expertise.

All signs point to a very active 2024 fire year. We will continue safe, effective initial attack to protect communities, critical infrastructure, and natural resources. In doing so, I expect all
leaders to put our people first as they put themselves in harm’s way to protect communities and landscapes. Your role as leaders is pivotal to sustaining our organization and ensuring our  employees feel safe—psychologically, physically and socially. Safety is one of our core values.  As such, I expect us to remain committed to a safe and resilient workforce which also means continued emphasis on employee well-being. Setting clear expectations for resource availability is vital to managing employee mental and physical fatigue and balancing wildfire response demands with hazardous fuels reduction needs. As I stated last year, we will continue to support and defend any employee who is doing work to support our mission. I also expect us to continue to address instances of harassment or bullying immediately and reflect these policies in our work environment and in your delegation letters.

Acknowledging the inherent risks in suppressing wildfires, I expect us to continue to use all available tools and technologies to ensure proactive prescribed fire planning and implementation, fire detection, risk assessments, fire response, and post-fire recovery. Every fire will receive a risk-informed response; we know the most effective strategies are collaboratively carried-out, at the local level. I expect all line officers and fire leaders to be inclusive with stakeholders during pre-season collaboration. This builds a common understanding of strategic risk assessments, strategic actions to protect identified values at risk, and expected fire response. The best research-informed tool we have for doing this is Potential Operational Delineations (PODs). Pre-planning with Potential Operational Delineations (PODs), better forecasting and knowledge of existing fuel treatments, and risk-sharing dialogue with community members, stakeholders, and cooperators, will help us make informed decisions that balance resource objectives with safety and community protection. I expect all line officers and fire managers to make use of PODs, which should be nearly complete in the West, or alternative science-based means for ensuring effective pre-season collaboration. When looking at using all tools in the toolbox, line officers should also ensure they are working in close collaboration with affected partners like industry, including the ability to mobilize resources in a collaborative manner through mechanisms like the National Alliance of Forest Owners Fire Suppression Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

As outlined in the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy Addendum Update, we will depend on research to inform our use of both planned and unplanned fire, and natural ignitions. This year, Regional Foresters will again approve or disapprove use of natural ignitions as a management strategy during Preparedness Levels 4 and 5, in accordance with the Interagency Standards for Fire and Fire Aviation (Red Book). Increasingly, we see the potential for fire to increase landscape resilience when conditions permit.

Our focus must remain on achieving our “Wildfire Crisis Strategy” landscape restoration goals, while fulfilling our leadership role in emergency response. In 2023 the agency built a strong foundation to help us achieve these goals, including using emergency authorities to support the “Wildfire Crisis Strategy,” releasing the National Prescribed Fire Resource Mobilization Strategy, and “A Strategy to Expand Prescribed Fire in the West”, establishing the Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program, and expanding partnerships through our Keystone Agreements. I expect us to lean into these innovations in 2024; but I am also challenging all of us collectively to keep pushing forward to unlock new innovations. This means viewing our landscapes holistically together with partners; truly being inclusive by inviting new partners to the table; and learning from our Tribal partners and their indigenous ecological knowledge gained from managing fire since time immemorial.

To keep moving forward on our journey to destigmatize mental health and wellness support, we will continue to offer care services including Critical Incident Stress Management, Casualty Assistance and Employee Assistance programs. Access to culturally competent clinical care for wildland firefighters is something the Joint Wildland Firefighter Health and Wellbeing Program with the U.S. Department of the Interior will continue to develop. Through this program, clinician-led mental health education sessions will be made available for units before the height of the fire year to reinforce the importance of employee wellbeing. Claims processes and employee coverage for presumptive illnesses have changed and I expect leaders to ensure they and their employees receive sufficient information and training. We must be ready to personally engage in support of our employees needing those services.

It is my expectation we will adhere to the seven tactical recommendations of the 2022 National Prescribed Fire Program Review. Agency Administrators will continue to authorize a new ignition for each operational period while considering fuels and potential fire behavior in areas adjacent to the planned burn and documenting regionally relevant drought metrics. A declared wildfire review will be the standard approach whenever a prescribed fire is declared a wildfire.  Forest Service Manual 5140 and the NWCG Standards for Prescribed Fire Planning and Implementation, PMS 484, will dictate declared wildfire reviews. These combined efforts, and remaining anchored in our core values of safety, interdependence, conservation, diversity, and service, are paving the path to a future where the Forest Service remains the world’s expert in fire management and a trusted employer of choice.

In closing, I thank you for your commitment to put people first. We will stay the course and continue to fight for a permanent pay increase for firefighters, as well as pay stability for all incident responders. I also thank each of our employees for their continued dedication to the agency mission and service to the Nation.