Senate supplemental would approve Obama's wildfire disaster bid

E&E News
By Phil Taylor
July 24, 2014

The Senate's $3.57 billion supplemental funding bill includes $615 million to fight wildfires and would also approve President Obama's request to fight some future wildfires using disaster funds, the chamber's top appropriator said yesterday.

Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said it is "urgent" that Congress provide relief to firefighters while also providing emergency funds to address the crisis of migrant children along the southern U.S. border and Israel's anti-missile defense system.

"We need to be able to provide the support to fight those fires and help our neighbors in those Western states," Mikulski said in a speech on the Senate floor.

Mikulski in a statement Tuesday had touted the $615 million in wildfire funding but made no mention of including the disaster funding language. She had also previously spoken about keeping the immigration portion of the funding bill clean.

But the panel's inclusion of the disaster language is a major victory for the Forest Service, conservationists, sportsmen's groups, loggers and other forest users, who have lobbied hard to have some catastrophic wildfires funded the same way as other natural disasters, including hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.

It's the first time the proposal has advanced in either chamber.

The language in Mikulski's bill is modeled on S. 1875, by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), and is designed to "break the destructive cycle" of having to borrow non-fire funds when suppression money runs out, as has happened in most years in the past decade, according to a committee summary of the bill.

Mikulski said wildfires were raging across the West yesterday -- though the overall acreage burned this year is still less than half the 10-year average for this date, according to federal data.

But even if the Senate bill passes, the House's supplemental funding bill is expected to include neither the $615 million nor the disaster language contained in the Senate bill. A House appropriations aide said federal agencies still have several hundreds of millions of dollars to fight fires, so the funding is not yet urgent.

House Democrats continue to push for a vote on a bipartisan companion bill to the Wyden-Crapo measure. While that bill has more than 50 Republican co-sponsors, no Republicans have signed a Democratic discharge petition to force a vote on the bill.

As of last night, 182 Democrats had signed the petition. It needs 219 signatures to force a floor vote.

"What has this House of Representatives done while the bone-dry West has gone up in flames?" said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.). "Nothing. Not even a hearing on this bipartisan, common-sense legislation to fix our wildfire funding crisis."

Reporter Nick Juliano contributed.