The Government Accountability Office in a report issued today said the federal land management agencies have:
…improved their understanding of wildland fire’s ecological role on the landscape and have taken important steps toward enhancing their ability to cost-effectively protect communities and resources by seeking to:
(1) make communities and resources less susceptible to being damaged by wildland fire and
(2) respond to fire so as to protect communities and important resources at risk while also considering both the cost and long-term effects of that response.
But the GAO says there is more work to do:
(1) Develop a cohesive strategy laying out various potential approaches for addressing the growing wildland fire threat, including estimating costs associated with each approach and the trade-offs involved. Such information would help the agencies and Congress make fundamental decisions about an effective and affordable approach to responding to fires.
(2) Establish a cost-containment strategy that clarifies the importance of containing costs relative to other, often-competing objectives. Without such clarification, GAO believes managers in the field lack a clear understanding of the relative importance that the agencies’ leadership places on containing costs and are therefore likely to continue to select firefighting strategies without duly considering the costs of suppression.
(3) Clarify financial responsibilities for fires that cross federal, state, and local jurisdictions. Unless the financial responsibilities for multijurisdictional fires are clarified, concerns that the existing framework insulates nonfederal entities from the cost of protecting the wildland-urban interface from fire–and that the federal government would thus continue to bear more than its share of the cost–are unlikely to be addressed.
(4) Take action to mitigate the effects of rising fire costs on other agency programs. The sharply rising costs of managing wildland fires have led the agencies to transfer funds from other programs to help pay for fire suppression, disrupting or delaying activities in these other programs. Better methods of predicting needed suppression funding could reduce the need to transfer funds from other programs.
