http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...0%257E,00.html

editorial
Neglect feeds future fires

Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - Talk about being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
The Bush administration plans to, in effect, cut funding to prevent wildfires,
even as the West faces a looming wildfire season that may prove worse than last
year's costly infernos.
Bush's just-unveiled budget calls for increasing the wildfire-prevention budget
by 1.3 percent - not enough to stay even with inflation's 4 percent growth.

Administration officials claim they can make up the difference between real
dollars and inflation by eliminating environmental rules, but that assumption
has yet to be proven true.

Instead of being able to save money by loosening the rules, the
admininistration may end up spending still more fighting the lawsuits some
environmental groups have promised to file over the issue.

The budget clearly shows that, despite its public pronouncements, the Bush
administration isn't making wildfire prevention a high priority. The
president's budget calls for increasing the wildfire-prevention fund by an
inflation-lagging $3 million nationwide. Meanwhile, the Bush crew plans to
spend an additional $7 million speeding up applications for livestock-grazing
permits on public lands and another $3 million to boost oil and gas leasing on
public lands.

The figures indicate that the Interior and Agriculture departments may have
been pulling the wool over the public's eyes about their agencies' priorities.

In December, Interior and Agriculture Secretaries Gale Norton and Anne Veneman
announced that the wildfire budgets for national parks and the Bureau of Land
Management and U.S. Forest Service would increase by 13 percent, or roughly
$160 million, above last year's budgeted figures.

But the increase is smoke and mirrors. The just-unveiled budget shows that
almost all that new money is earmarked for fighting, not preventing, wildfires.

Yet the government will always spend whatever is necessary to battle big blazes
on public lands. Last year, actual spending ran about $1.3 billion, or more
than double the $600 million that the new budget earmarks for wildfire
suppression.

Environmental groups likely will claim that whatever funds the administration
plans to spend on wildfire prevention could instead get diverted into
traditional logging programs that involve removing big, fire-resistant trees,
do little to reduce fire hazards and, in some situations, actually may increase
the chances for catastrophic blazes.

Whether their claim proves true depends on how the administration actually uses
the few dollars designated for fire-prevention projects.

But the reality revealed in the budget's numbers is stark: After undertaking an
enormous public-relations effort to convince Westerners that their tinder-dry
forests need to be rid of deadwood, dense underbrush and small, scraggly,
sickly trees, the administration now plans to shortchange that kind of work
just when it may be most urgently needed.