Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Ranking Member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, announced she will be working on a bill to reduce the cost of wildfires and increase the government’s ability to response in a wildfire emergency. The announcement comes just one day after the Committee examined the U.S. Forest Services’ wildland fire management capabilities on Tuesday. Senator Cantwell’s bill will address the following four areas: hazardous fuels, wildfire borrowing, budget accountability, and emergency response. While her bill will aim to prevent wildfire borrowing, she has indicated it will be different from the Wyden-Crapo bill. She has not released a timeline for when she plans to introduce the bill, but has indicated it will likely be in the next few months. Senator Cantwell’s announcement of her legislation came after the Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing earlier this week on wildfire management.
Senator Cantwell, and other democrats on the Committee, sought answers to the agency’s fire suppression funding issue. Almost all members of the Committee, including Republicans, agree that a new mechanism for funding suppression efforts is needed in order to protect other agency programs from being affected by rising suppression costs. Committee Republicans, however, remain divided between their support for the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, a measure that would shift 30 percent of suppression costs to disaster funding, and between a measure sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) that would allow the agency to access disaster relief money only after all Congressionally appropriated money is expended. The Committee also discussed NEPA streamlining for forest projects, hazardous fuels reductions through the biomass industry, and the need to better protect and promote resiliency at the Wildland Urban Interface.