The firefighters pay cut may be averted. Or not.

A long-running effort to permanently boost pay — an effort that’s often felt fruitless and never-ending for thousands of federal firefighters — may be gaining traction in Congress, but it may very well be too little too late to prevent mass resignations in the coming weeks.

In Congress earlier this month, the House passed an amendment to extend a temporary pay increase of $20,000 (annually per firefighter) through next year, which was approved by President Biden. Another bill to make a pay hike permanent remains stalled, though, and NPR’s Morning Edition reported that this latest budget deal averting a federal  shutdown will also — for now — avert a massive pay cut for federal firefighters that was expected by November 17 — today.

Wildland firefighters on the Spring Creek Fire in Colorado on July 2, 2023
Wildland firefighters on the Spring Creek Fire in Colorado on July 2, 2023 — inciweb photo.

But how many times can individual firefighters and the fed employees’ union and the Grassroots Firefighters warn Congress about high-centering itself in managing wildfire crises?

“Basically this is like a band-aid. It’s not a fix. We need a fix,” says Mike Alba, a union organizer. Alba is an engine captain on the Los Padres National Forest.

Rookie firefighters now make only about $15 hour — which is (dismally) up from just $13 an hour after Biden approved a temporary increase back in 2021. Funds from the infrastructure law later gave many firefighters a $20,000 boost in pay. Tom Dillon, a captain for the Alpine Hotshots based in Rocky Mountain National Park, says everyone’s talking about their paychecks when they should be focused on firefighting tactics and safety.

“It’s kind of a slap in the face,” Dillon says. “The folks on Capitol Hill, some of them aren’t even aware of who we are and what we do and that there is a federal wildland firefighting workforce.”

Crews are now challenged with not only more severe and longer fire seasons, but also by flattening overtime pay, dwindling retention, suppressed hiring abilities, and growing mental health challenges. Alba says this onetime pay bump is a kind of a lifeline: he can spend a little more time with his kids. He will probably keep his higher pay for a while, but just till January — unless Congress actually manages to make the 2021 pay boost permanent.

But morale is low, and the union representing federal employees (a percentage of whom are firefighters) warns that at least 30 percent of the federal firefighter ranks will likely quit if pay isn’t permanently boosted — and soon. They are tired of sweating next month’s rent or living in their cars, and the struggle for a decent wage has worn out more than a few.

As The Guardian reported back in 2021, federal firefighters are often living out of their cars (!) because the job doesn’t pay enough for basic housing costs — even for a single person, let alone a young firefighter trying to help support a family.

Guardian report on firefighter pay

The federal government — including at least five different agencies that employ wildland firefighters in the U.S. — fights and manages  fires in all 50 states. Every major fire in the country relies on federal firefighters and the resources and funding and massive response that the federal government can and does provide. Federal agencies, however, now face a severe and costly retention problem with the wildland fire workforce. If Congress cannot fix this, and the federal firefighting forces continue to bleed fire crews and employees, what’s the backup plan?

TELL CONGRESS we need to pay firefighters!

Did you know federal firefighters are up for a big pay cut at the end of September? They are. You agree with that? We don’t either.

firefighter fiscal cliffThe federal government’s fiscal year runs from October 1 of one calendar year through September 30 of the next, and if Congress doesn’t act to pass legislation, then the current temporary funding to retain firefighters runs out! This puts federal firefighters and their families in a helluva bind — they will be forced to choose between staying in a job they love with dramatically less pay, or finding better-paying work to get by. The Forest Service itself has testified before Congress that without a permanent pay solution, somewhere between 30 percent and 50 percent of its firefighters will leave the ranks — triggering unsafe work environments for remaining fire crews and leaving many fires unstaffed.

Join with us and the GRASSROOTS WILDLAND FIREFIGHTERS and sign this petition to make sure Congress knows what’s at stake here. “We will give the signed petition to each member of Congress,” says Riva Duncan, the organization’s vice president, “and we’ll urge them to avoid the Firefighter Fiscal Cliff. Please share this petition with your family, friends, colleagues — and anyone else who cares about this nation’s beloved public lands.”

SIGN THE PETITIONLearn more about the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and how you can help here:

grassrootswildlandfirefighters.com
grassrootswildlandfirefighters.com

Fire politics (Groundhog Day edition)

Still from Groundhog Day (1993), with Bill Murray (weatherman Phil) and Phil (the Groundhog).
Still from Groundhog Day (1993), with Bill Murray (weatherman Phil) and Phil the groundhog.

The IMDB description of the 1993 film Groundhog Day offers this hope for escaping the whirlpool: “A narcissistic, self-centered weatherman finds himself in a time loop on Groundhog Day, and the day keeps repeating until he gets it right.”

Thirty years of film history later, in our wildfire world we may seem stuck like weatherman Phil, repeating the day (and our fire processes) until we get it right. Yet a range of recent releases may hint of some key transitions.

If you have a bit of time (as did weatherman Phil), you might explore the documents put in play. The most concise might be the Wildfire Emergency Act of 2023 – you can track it at https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/s188 – but for now the full text is at sponsor Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s site.

The legislation introduced on the last day of January 2023 builds from the same-named act of 2021 (should they have just waited for Groundhog Day?), which didn’t progress in 2021, but the emergency frame and elements have reappeared in this new bill. The legislation has bipartisan support, with Republican Montana Sen. Steve Daines joining three Democrats – sponsor Feinstein and cosponsoring senators Alex Padilla of California and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

While the bill is framed as a response to the wildfire and climate emergency, many of the proposals reflect the rise of  “cohesive strategy” as a core vision for fire initiatives. As Wyden said, “To address the threat of catastrophic wildfires in the West an all-of-the-above approach is needed. This means making essential upgrades to keep the lights on when disaster strikes and giving communities the firefighting workforce and latest technology required to get fires under control. Our bill also prioritizes mitigation work now to prevent wildfires from turning into the megafires that destroy lives and property. The climate crisis is here, and the West needs more support.”

Feinstein affirms the all-hands-on-deck approach. “Every level of government and the private sector must be involved in this fight, and this bill will go a long way toward helping us prepare for a hotter, drier future.”

What a region-specific and bottom-to-top bill might actually produce, if a lot of committee meetings, votes, and budget-wrangling welds it into law, may include both specified and unspecified funds to accomplish key fireshed transitions. The news release offers a synthesis – with proposed commitments to landscape-scale forest restoration, community-level resilience, and added emphasis and new initiatives on applied sensing technology and workforce development.

A change of note: the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) is to be consulted on one or more Prescribed Fire Training Centers in any state entirely located west of the 100th meridian. This will offer a key expansion and a fire-regime diversification of the essential work by the single national center in Florida, but equally noteworthy is that JFSP still exists and may play a key role in this initiative – since not so long ago folks had to argue to keep JFSP funded.

What may be missing are elements of national workforce change and a lack of “moonshot” glitter in both the funding and unspecified tech initiatives. But what’s here promises to expand recent initiatives to more stakeholders. If adopted, we might see at least one prescribed fire training center identified within a year and funding for wildfire and forest-restoration training centers West-wide (with grants to states, academic institutions, and professional organizations that may speed the rollout). Additionally, up to 20 landscapes of 100,000 acres will use $250 million “to increase the pace and scale of forest restoration and wildfire resilience projects.”  That’s $125 an acre for some 2 million acres, which promises a lot of work, commensurate with “the true cost of fire” (reported by Bill Gabbert in 2020), which quotes Prof. Ernesto Alvarado: “I think we should concentrate more on the human losses.” These funds will align with $50 million for community grants and a $13,000 per low-income household for wildfire-hardening retrofits.

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The challenges to the wildfire workforce are increasing due in no small part to fire regime shifts that prompted the Wildfire Emergency Act, yet the pace of federal administrative change may not be ramping as fast as the fires. Which is where our political change is at now – fed by the concerns from public and legislators and the push by firefighter advocates like the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters (GRWFF) and the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFF).

This is the background to two recent letters seeking to amp up and wisen up the changes. One, sent January 18 from a bipartisan group of seven western senators to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), seeks clarification and correction to federal housing guidelines that undercut firefighter recruitment and retention. Such as: if your roommate leaves (not something you can usually manage), you pay their part of the rent. support to correct housing inequities. As well as changes to bunkhouse and remote-housing formulas for determining rent. In their request for a briefing on OMB Circular A-45R, the senators observe that “Federal wildland firefighters have a difficult and dangerous job, and it is the federal government’s responsibility to support them in this work.”

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The second letter, from GRWFF and NFFF to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), takes a broader focus and goes farther — but essentially, even existentially – into the deep regarding the November 2022 GAO report, “Wildland Fire: Barriers to Recruitment and Retention of Federal Wildland Firefighters,” that identified some but not all of the barriers and reforms identified by groups like the GRWFF and NFFF.

There’s much in the letter that will shape the dialogues this coming year (which we’ll be following), but as good a place to start now is the direct request to the GAO toward the letter’s close:
“Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and NFFE deeply appreciate the GAO’s initial report. Considering its blind spots, however, we respectfully request a second investigation into these barriers, and a second report, one that incorporates the input of a significant number of current and former wildland firefighters – and prioritizes the wisdom of those who occupy marginalized identities.”

Among many questions and suggestions regarding pay, housing, equity, work-life balance, retirement (covering most of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, many of which aren’t supported currently), the letter highlights that “the elephant in the room is safety and health – what our firefighters risk every day. Although federal wildland firefighters are at higher risks of cancers, cardiovascular diseases, PTSD and traumatic injuries, these go undiscussed in the GAO’s report. The federal government does not recognize a correlation between environmental exposures such as wildfire smoke and the incidence of cancers or cardiovascular diseases. More than two dozen firefighters died in the line of duty in 2022 fighting wildfires. These risks are unaccounted for when determining pay for firefighters. Prospective recruits and veteran firefighters balk at the low pay for a job that may injure or kill them and will take years off their lives. Although federal wildland firefighters can spend over 1,000 hours every fire season exposed to these hazards, no formal education program exists on either the dangerous consequences or mitigation strategies for employees.”

For additional details, see the January 25 letter and the set of reforms proposed by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and NFFF in 2022.

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For the record, Punxsutawney Phil reportedly saw his shadow today and his managers are predicting six more weeks of winter. To my knowledge, few fire managers base their spring prescribed fire plans on whether Phil sees his shadow. Yet we in the fire profession can claim a key functional connection: this rodent-centric celebration has roots in such say-goodbye-to-winter traditions as Candlemas (and its hedgehog) and the Irish/Celtic celebration of St. (née goddess) Brigid, all of which are celebrated with bonfires and candles. So light a fire to the passing of winter, but do note that yesterday’s Fire Outlook predicts a mellower beginning to fire season, which may at least mean we’re not as likely to see the shadows of recent active early fire seasons.

Forest Service completes long-overdue report about 10-year aircraft contracts but will not release it right away

March 1, 2022

Tanker 12 dropping Alisal Fire
Tanker 12, a BAe-146, dropping on the northwest side of the Alisal Fire near Santa Barbara, California, Oct. 13, 2021. Photo by Santa Barbara County FD.

Thirteen members of Congress signed a letter February 2, 2022 asking the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture about a long-overdue report regarding shifting from 1-year to 10-year contracts for firefighting aircraft.

Many of the contracts for firefighting aircraft issued by the Forest Service in recent years have been for only one guaranteed year with a few more years possible on a year by year approval basis. Some air tanker vendors have found it challenging to develop the aircraft and then hire, train, and retain employees with nothing guaranteed beyond one year.

The Consolidated Appropriation Act of 2021 which became law December 27, 2020 required that the report about 10-year contracts be submitted no later than March 27, 2021. When the letter (below) was written, the document still had not been submitted, and was more than 300 days overdue.

On Tuesday March 1, a spokesperson for the US Forest Service, Stanton Florea, told Fire Aviation that the agency sent the report to the Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, on February 8. In compliance with Public Law 111–88, Mr. Florea said, after 45 days it will be posted to the Forest Service website at: www.fs.fed.us/about-agency/budget-performance.

When we asked for a copy of a letter that would have been in response to the February 2 inquiry from the 13 members of Congress, Mr. Florea said it is”currently going through clearance and is not yet available.”

Elizabeth Daniels is the Communications Director for the Congressional Western Caucus which posted the letter to the USFS on the Caucus’ website. The Caucus, rather than individual Representatives’ offices, are the lead on issues like this, we were told by Amanda Fitzmorris, the Press Secretary for Rep. Dan Newhouse, the Chair of the Caucus.

The Congressional Western Caucus lists 85 members on its website, many of which are from surprising locations considering the name of the organization — Louisiana, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa. Most, however, are from states west of the Mississippi River.

Ms. Daniels confirmed that the Caucus has the report from the USFS about the 10-year contracts, but she could not send us a copy.

“We’ve got a lot of different cooks in the kitchen on this one…I’m trying to get the information out as soon as possible,” Ms. Daniels said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to turn some of the recommendations and things that they’ve put into the report into some legislative items. So while you may not get the actual physical report, you’ll kind of get the gist of what they said through our actions.”

She later said if the report is approved for release, she could then distribute it.

In testimony April 15, 2021 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, U.S. Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen was asked about the report, which at the time was about 19 days late.

“Relative to your question about air tankers, the contracting air tanker community has really come on line, they are meeting our needs of contemporary air tanker capacity for wildland fire in the U.S,” Chief Christiansen said. “We are studying the question about going to a 10-year contract, what the pros and cons are. We’re nearly complete with that report. It will be going through clearance in a matter of a few days and it will be getting to the committee here shortly. So we’d be glad to discuss more about air tankers. But we think we are really on the right track with our air tankers. And thank you for being such a help and an advocate for getting us get the right resources.”

We have written about 1-year and 10-year contracts several times. Here is an excerpt from an article published December 17, 2021, titled, Forest Service says there’s not enough time to issue new helicopter contracts for 2022.

Our take

Less than three months after Forest Service Chief Christiansen said the agency was going to release a report “shortly” about the feasibility of moving to 10-year contracts, they issued a presolicitation for helicopter contracts that guaranteed one year. (Fire Aviation requested a copy of the report at the time, but it was not provided.)

In December, 2017 the US Forest Service canceled a five-year exclusive use (EU) contract it had issued the previous year for two CL-415 water scooping air tankers. So a one-year contract with each additional option year at the discretion of the agency with unreliable congressional funding is not a concept that makes potential vendors feel all warm and fuzzy.

That year the FS also reduced the number of Type 1 helicopters on EU contract from 34 to 28 and canceled a solicitation for up to seven large air tankers, citing a lack of funding.

In 2018 when the Forest Service began issuing one-year contracts for air tankers we wrote:

Few if any vendors can simply write a check to purchase and convert an air tanker, so they have to convince a lender to give them large sums of money usually even before they have a contract with the USFS. With this new one-year contract policy, obtaining those funds could be even more difficult.

Below is an excerpt from the Missoulian:

“They’re only offering a one-year contract,” said Ron Hooper, president of Missoula-based Neptune Aviation. “We can’t go to the bank with a one-year contract to finance airplanes. They just laugh at us.”

Even if a vendor received a guaranteed five-year contract it can be difficult to establish and implement a long-term business plan that would make sense to their banker and the solvency of the company.

These one-year firefighting aircraft contracts need to be converted to 10-year contracts, and the number of Type 1 helicopters must be restored to at least the 34 we had for years.

Below is the letter sent by the 13 members of Congress dated February 2, 2022.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://fireaviation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Congressional-letter-10-year-contracts.pdf” title=”Congressional letter, 10-year contracts”]

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Gerald.