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Commissioner urges legislature to restore wildfire prevention funding as costs and smoke rise
Summary
The Commissioner of Public Lands urged lawmakers to restore prevention funding — including continued use of Climate Commitment Act dollars — and said recent cuts from previously planned biennial allocations will raise future costs. Officials warned reduced prevention funding will increase fires, smoke and taxpayer expenses.
The state’s Commissioner of Public Lands used a press briefing on active wildfires to press the legislature to restore funding for wildfire prevention and response, saying cuts to recently planned dollars will increase future fires, smoke impacts and costs to taxpayers.
The Commissioner called prevention activities — thinning, prescribed burns, equipment purchases and community preparedness — a core public-safety function and argued that investing in prevention saves money by preventing large, costly fires. “If the legislature doesn't restore our wildfire prevention and response funding, we will see more fires, bigger fires, and higher cost to taxpayers with more smoke impacting people's health,” the Commissioner said.
Asked about specific funding sources, the Commissioner said Washington has used Climate Commitment Act funds in part for prevention because wildfire prevention reduces carbon emissions, and asked the legislature to consider continued use of those funds. The Commissioner also described a prior legislative commitment of $500 million (structured as $125 million per biennium in earlier planning) and said the most recent biennium funding was cut to $60 million (with $40 million in the first year and $20 million the next), a reduction the Commissioner warned will begin producing higher costs and larger fires in the following year.
Incident commanders at the briefing reiterated that operations are expensive — on the order of $1,000,000 a day for large incidents — and said prevention work such as prescribed burns and fuel treatments, often funded by dedicated programs, is their best long-term tool to reduce catastrophic fires and smoke.
The Commissioner framed prevention as both a public-safety and economic measure and urged legislators to identify dedicated funding sources — whether fees or long-term revenue mechanisms — to sustain the work. No legislative response was provided at the briefing; officials said they would continue to brief lawmakers and the public as the season and budget process evolve.
