Catastrophic wildfires are rare in Florida, but the state is not immune to the impact of ferocious blazes that have plagued the West with increasing frequency and intensity.
As costs to fight the fires climb, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service has been forced to take money away from other areas to make up the shortfall. In federal forests, such as the Apalachicola, land management, restoration, conservation, recreation and research projects have gotten the short end of the budgetary stick.
“It’s not just a Western thing,” USDA Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment Robert Bonnie told the Tallahassee Democrat during an interview Monday. “We’ve shifted money away from all these other things because we have to fight fires and that means we are doing less of everything else. And that’s why it’s a national problem.”
In 1995, he said the Forest Service spent about 16 percent of its budget fighting fire. Today that percentage has climbed to 42 percent. In bad years, the service spends nearly half its budget on fire fighting.
“We get in the middle of fire season,” Bonnie said, “and we run out of money we call up the Apalachicola National Forest and say, ‘Sorry, you can’t expend that trails money, you can’t expend that restoration money, we need it back.’ Then we transfer that money out West.” Such “fire borrowing,” he said, is at best disruptive and at worst, projects are scrapped.
From the Tallahassee Democrat: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2015/04/13/local-forests-impacted-far-away-fires/25736863/?utm_campaign=[%27WeekInTrees%27]&utm_source=[%27WIT041715%27]&utm_medium=[%27Email%27