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Panel urges incentives, prescribed‑fire insurance and tribal leadership to scale wildfire treatments
Summary
At WFPA's annual meeting, panelists said scaling cross‑boundary forest resilience work requires incentives for large‑tree retention, changes to diameter limits, workforce investment and a proposed prescribed‑fire insurance product to enable cultural and cross‑boundary burns.
Robert Bass, the Washington Forest Protection Association president, opened the association’s 116th annual meeting and framed active management as central to wildfire risk reduction and local economies. Moderator Julie Anderson then convened a panel that recommended concrete policy steps to speed treatments across ownership boundaries.
The panel’s first recommendations centered on incentives and regulatory changes to enable larger‑scale restoration. Steve Rigdon said tribes and private landowners need incentives that value large trees while also enabling understory and midstory treatments. “We’re working on a proposal with Sustainable Northwest right now to allow private landowners, tribes, anybody else involved to have access for prescribed‑fire insurance,” Rigdon said, adding he will advocate for the idea in Olympia.
Panelists pressed for adjustments to diameter limits and trust‑land sales that currently favor the highest bidder rather than broader ecological or community outcomes. Matt Kamisky said federal and state rule constraints — including east‑side diameter rules and aspects of the Northwest Forest Plan — can block needed treatments on public lands, and urged maintaining aerial suppression funding so air resources are available to all landowners when fires start.
Speakers emphasized workforce development as a prerequisite for scaling treatments. “We need a massive campaign to get into our schools to recruit the next generation,” Rigdon said, noting competition for labor in tribal and rural communities.
Why it matters: Panelists argued that technical fixes (permits, markets for residuals) and targeted incentives can increase pace and scale of forest health work, reduce catastrophic fire risk, and create local economic opportunity. Several speakers recommended aligning funding and procurement to encourage local processing capacity so restoration yields usable material rather than waste.
The roundtable session closed with a practical proposal: a multi‑party funding target to sustain restoration work over time. One panelist suggested aiming for about $100 million per year to uplift capacity across federal, state, tribal and private lands; the roundtable plans to prioritize initiatives at its next meeting.
Looking ahead: The roundtable will meet again and select initiatives for immediate action; organizers said they will convey those priorities to state leaders and Commissioner Hilary Franz.
