Oregon lawmakers will have a one-day special session this past week before the legislature begins officially in January. The governor has called them there to allocate over $200 million dollars in emergency spending for this year’s unprecedented wildfire season. We’ll get a preview of the session with OPB’s Dirk VanderHart.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon lawmakers are getting ready for their 2025 session right now. It starts in January. Transportation and housing are some of the likely big items. But before that, Gov. Tina Kotek has asked them to come in for a one-day special session. She wants them to allocate over $200 million in emergency spending to pay for the response to this year’s unprecedented wildfire season.
OPB’s political reporter Dirk VanderHart joins us now with a preview. Dirk, good to see you.
Dirk VanderHart: Hey, Dave.
Miller: Can you just first give us a sense for the scale of the 2024 wildfire season in Oregon?
VanderHart: This was the biggest fire season in terms of acres burned since the state began taking reliable records in the early ’90s. All told, more than 1.9 million acres were burned, which is three times the average over the last decade. It’s a lot. We saw six fires that the state classifies as mega fires, which means they were over 100,000 acres. That’s more than … the 2020 fire year, a lot of people will remember because it was a lot west of the Cascades, some really big fires threatening a lot of people. This fire season was centered more on rural forests and rangelands in Eastern and Central Oregon. But it was a very, very big fire year.
Miller: At the beginning of the fire season, it seemed like maybe we would get away with a light year. What happened?
VanderHart: You’re right, in June, we were looking at lessened drought conditions. There was above average snowpack, a lot of things that might have suggested things would stay moist and maybe fires would be tamped down. That changed in early July when we saw that heat wave you probably remember, day after day after day of 100-plus degree temperatures that really dried out the landscape very, very quickly. Then we got a bunch of dry lightning storms that set hundreds of fires across the landscape.
By late July, the forestry department was reporting dozens of fires burning more than 800,000 acres. They say we were actually the top firefighting priority in the country at that point. So, as I said, all said and done around 2 million acres scorched. The state had incurred total costs of around $350 million. And we were sort of wondering how we’d deal with it.
Miller: Based on your reporting, it seems like the funding issue is not just about the total acreage here, which is massive, but also where those acres were. Can you explain that?
VanderHart: Where fires occur has a big impact on what a fire season might ultimately cost the state of Oregon. If fires begin on federally-controlled lands — which is a lot of Oregon — and they stay on federally-controlled lands, the federal government is responsible for picking up that tab. But when fires occur on lands protected by the state’s Department of Forestry or other agencies, the state is at least initially going to be paying the costs of fighting those. And this year, we had a lot of fires on state protected land. Compared to last year, about 17 times more acres burned on Department of Forestry (ODF) protected lands this year than last year, for instance. And it was well over the average too.
So that really ramps up costs. And to be clear, the federal government ultimately will pick up a good chunk of the tap this year, something like 60% of that $350 million I mentioned. But state officials say that reimbursement can take up to two years, sometimes longer. And in the meantime, the state is facing a mountain of, months old at this point, invoices from all the people it hired to fight fires and do a bunch of other work, which is why we are holding the special session you mentioned.
Miller: This gets us to maybe the most complicated piece of the story, which is the way wildfire response is funded at the state level. Can you just give us the simplified version?
VanderHart: Yeah. I will try my best.
The state’s wildfire funding is set up so that the state pays part of the costs, but also the landowners whose lands are, in theory, protected by the state efforts pay some of the cost. They pay a per acre fee every year, depending on what kind of land they own and where it is in the state.
Basically, Oregon puts funding into two buckets. There is base funding which goes toward paying all the people and apparatus for the main firefighting structure, and to keep most fires, 94% or 95%, under 10 acres — really tamp things down. But then there’s money for what is called large fires or emergency fires that spread quickly, or they maybe pose a threat to life or structures. And that is less money. Every year, the first $20 million in costs for large fires is split between the state and landowners. But after that $20 million, the state is fully on the hook from its general fund for whatever the fire season is going to cost. And remember, the general fund pays for education, it pays for health care, it pays for a ton of different things. So that’s part of the problem here too, competing interests.
Miller: So how much state money was allocated specifically for wildfire response this year?
VanderHart: That base funding I mentioned was about $75 million just to pay for the system as it is. And then there was $10 million or so pre-approved for those large fires. Obviously, far, far less than we needed for large fires.
Miller: Because you said it was $350 million that was spent.
VanderHart: Well yeah, that’s [what] we’re on the hook for. To date, the legislature has approved $40 million via its emergency process. But the vast majority of the money is not something that was pre-approved to fund fire. So agencies have had to pull from their existing budgets, try to shunt money around to get money out the door. And there’s just not enough right now.
Miller: What kinds of things was this money actually spent on?
VanderHart: It pays for a wide range of costs for fighting fires. So things like specialty aircraft, that are gonna douse fires or monitor the landscape. But also all the activity on the ground, from firefighters to heavy equipment, actually supplying water tankers, or folks building fire lines that block the progress of a wildfire, all those things. There are also these large sort of communities that pop up around a firefight, that ODF spokesmen referred to as like a small village. All that takes money. And we spoke with contractors as preparation for covering the session, who have been waiting three, four months to be paid for their efforts. And they’re saying “We have creditors, they are running out of patience. I may have to take out some more loans to pay my employees. This is really not fun anymore.”
Miller: So let’s turn to the upcoming session. Is the bill or bills that lawmakers are going to be considering all ready to go?
VanderHart: It seems like it’s all ready to go. Lawmakers are meeting actually as we speak, or maybe they just ended, to take up this bill that will be the vehicle that they take up tomorrow. It looks like a pretty cut and dried process.
Miller: What’s it gonna do?
VanderHart: It’s actually pretty boring. It’s really just an appropriations bill that is going to send $218 million to two state agencies. One is the Department of Forestry, which is the sort of primary agency for fighting fires. We’ve talked about them a lot. The other is the Office of State Fire Marshal, which gets involved when fires begin to threaten the population centers and structures. They are short about $218 million, they need to stay solvent. Lawmakers are preparing to sort of give them the OK to spend it.
Miller: The conventional wisdom is that governors only call special sessions if they already have the lined up, otherwise it’s a waste of time and an embarrassment too. Is that the case? What are the politics of this right now?
VanderHart: That is the case. There’s no sign that anyone is going to stand in the way of this. Obviously, Democrats have supermajorities in both chambers so they could do it on their own. But I don’t get any sense that Republicans are going to put up any fight. A lot of these fires took place in rural areas that are their districts. They would like the folks who are often their constituents paid for the work they are doing. There’s going to be no issue in getting this money passed.
What we have seen though is some grumbling. Whenever you talk about wildfire in the legislature, there tends to be a difference of opinion between folks who really want to see more active management of the landscape and maybe want to see more forest thinning or forest cutting, as a means of preventing fires — that’s often Republicans — and folks who are more opposed to that or don’t want to see as much logging. So there is a difference of approach, I would say, in how the state should move forward and sort of look to prevent wildfires. And we do see some grumbling around the edges there, maybe folks suggesting that the fire season could have been better if some more proactive measures were taken.
Miller: So tomorrow’s session, it’s a kind of surgical strike, a one-day budget fix. But as we’ve heard a lot in the past, climate change and a century of fire suppression, they’re making these huge fires more likely going forward. Are lawmakers talking about a structural change in the way that wildfire response is funded?
VanderHart: Yes. And they have been for about a decade. This whole episode I think really puts an exclamation point on this issue, which is really updating the way Oregon funds its efforts to both prevent and fight wildfires. We’ve talked about it a lot, as I’ve said, and we talked about it a lot recently. Last year, I think there were three bills floated in the legislative session for how to increase and change how we budget for wildfires. They range from just sort of rejiggering the formula for what landowners pay, what the state pays, and maybe putting more money into the system, to a proposal to clawing back some of the kicker refund that went back to taxpayers this year to create a self-sustaining fund that could help us fund wildfire going into the future.
None of it passed. There’s always controversy, there’s always enemies. So right now, there is a work group working towards some sort of solution or suggestions they might put before lawmakers in next year’s session. We expect it’s going to get a lot of attention. But as you know, Dave, that does not always mean it’s going to get any action.
Miller: Dirk, thanks very much.
VanderHart: My pleasure.
Miller: Dirk VanderHart is a member of OPB’s political reporting team.
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