Clinton Seeks $1.6 Billion to Ease Fire Risk

With the West ravaged by the worst wildfire season in decades, President Clinton on Saturday announced new steps to help the hardest-hit states and asked Congress for $1.6 billion to reduce the risk of future blazes.

The money would be used to help thin the dense underbrush that has accumulated as a result of the federal government’s past policy of extinguishing all wildfires. That policy has allowed the underbrush to grow unnaturally thick--and turn into potential tinder--in many forests.

To help repair the damage caused by this year’s fires--in Idaho, Montana and other Western states--Clinton said $40 million would be released for land restoration projects. And one-stop centers would be established locally to allow people to have access to unemployment assistance and small business loans.

“Once the fires are out, the threat doesn’t stop,” Clinton said in his Saturday radio address. “We want to make sure the help gets to those who need it right away.”

A Summer of Devastation

Clinton was acting in the wake of months of devastating wildfires, which already have burned more than 6.6 million acres in the West. More than 35 large fires still burn in nine states. More than 25,000 federal, state and local personnel have been enlisted to fight the flames.

Clinton in early August asked Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman to prepare recommendations on ways to help the fire-ravaged communities recover and a long-term strategy for avoiding such conflagrations in the future.

That report was submitted to the White House on Friday, and its recommendations were the basis of Clinton’s proposals.

The report comes at a time when some Republicans have been trying to make a political issue of the fires. Montana Gov. Marc Racicot recently blamed the Clinton administration for failing to act on evidence that Western states were facing increasingly hazardous fire conditions.

In their departments’ report, Babbitt and Glickman acknowledge that one factor in the intensity of this year’s fires has been the past practice of fighting all wildfires--a policy that gave priority to protecting people and property as the West became more populated during the last century.

“It was well-intentioned, but as a result, many of our forests now have an unnatural buildup of brush and shrubs,” Clinton said Saturday. “This excessive undergrowth fuels forest fires, making them far more dangerous and difficult to control.”

But the report cautioned that “reversing the effects a century of aggressive fire suppression has had on our nation’s public lands will be an evolutionary process, not one that can be completed in a few short years.”

Some logging interests have called for increased commercial logging on public lands to reduce fire hazards. But the administration has rejected that approach, and the report to the White House calls for continuing to do so. The removal of large trees for commercial purposes may even increase fire risk, the report said, by leaving small, highly flammable material such as twigs and needles on the forest floor.

The $1.6 billion sought by Clinton--for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1--would be used to build on administration efforts in recent years to reduce the forest underbrush by a variety of approaches, including controlled preventive fires and physical removal of undergrowth.

‘Rapid Response Teams’ to Aid Communities

The policy of preventive fires has come under special scrutiny since earlier this year, when one such fire burned out of control in New Mexico and endangered the sensitive government laboratory at Los Alamos.

This year’s wildfires have been fueled by the combustible combination of extremely hot, dry weather and lightning strikes.

As the smoke clears in the West, Clinton said, the government will send 50 “rapid response teams” to help communities repair damaged lands--through reseeding, for example--and protect water supplies. Water quality is a concern because rain could trigger mudslides on burned land and send dirty runoff into local water sources.

The request for the additional $1.6 billion is being put before the Republican-dominated Congress just as lawmakers are heading into their annual year-end budget battles with Clinton. It is the kind of politically appealing last-minute budget request that often helps run up the government budget and frustrates the efforts of fiscal conservatives to rein in spending.

In the GOP’s weekly radio address, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) warned Clinton against loading the year-end budget deal with pork barrel spending--although McCain admitted his own party often succumbs to the same temptation.

“I’m sorry to say that in past years some of us have bargained our way out of these annual budget battles by surrendering our principles and joining the president in a no-holds-barred race to the pork barrel,” McCain said.

However, Republicans are unlikely to resist the wildfire-related spending request from Clinton. “Congress is very concerned about the situation,” said Elizabeth Morra, spokeswoman for the House Appropriations Committee.