This week, the House Appropriations Committee approved the Interior and Environment funding bill, readying the bill for a vote in the full House before the August recess. The bill includes $442 million for Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT), and $4.1 billion for wildfire prevention and firefighting. The wildfire funding constitutes 14 percent of all funding in the bill, including $470 million to pay for the anticipated shortfall in this year’s funding. House Interior and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Ken Calvert (R-CA) said that a long-term solution to the chronic shortfall in wildfire funding needs to be found. Proposed bills to allow a portion of wildfire funding to be paid from emergency appropriations similar to other natural disasters have stalled in the House and Senate despite bipartisan support, as well as the President’s. The President requested $615 million for wildfires in his emergency supplemental request to address the immigration emergency. However, the House is expected to dramatically scale back the emergency supplemental, possibly dropping wildfire funding from the proposal. Meanwhile the Senate has seen no marked progress in recent weeks on any of its FY 2015 spending bills; however, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) said her committee may introduce a bill by the end of the month that would be a compromise between the various wildfire funding proposals. The bill would focus on providing more accurate forecasting models for developing fire budgets rather than a strict focus on fighting and preventing wildfires, and would address forest-thinning operations and practices.
