While the Feds Take a 'Burn It Down' Approach, Local Public Lands Could Quite Literally Burn

If you were worried about unauthorized camping and fires starting on public lands before, buckle up.

With cuts to U.S. Forest Service personnel happening, it’s going to be very tough to see a lot of enforcement or an increase in fire-management activity on our public lands this summer.

In the last several weeks, at least 3,400 employees of the U.S. Forest Service, along with 1,000 National Parks Service employees and some 800 Bureau of Land Management employees, were terminated from their positions. Some of these were wildland firefighters. Others were in positions that helped firefighters be more efficient at their jobs.

This will certainly have a wide range of ramifications, but one that stands out for those living here in Central Oregon is how the cuts will affect our area’s intersecting concerns around wildfire and camping on public lands.

Some of those who have recently been fired from their positions at the Deschutes National Forest were the staff who helped ensure those who were dispersed-camping in the area were putting out their fires and staying within the prescribed two-week limits at places like Phil’s Trail. Many in our region have accused the local National Forest leaders of doing too little to keep these things in check. This latest development will exacerbate the problem.

This past week, members of the Democratic delegation in Washington, D.C., sent a letter to the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior, asking them to reconsider the terminations, as well as the ongoing hiring freeze that is also in place.

“Fewer firefighters and insufficient staffing during fire season exacerbate fire response delays, prevent effective mitigation efforts and place lives, property and our environment at greater risk,” Oregon’s House Democrats wrote.

We’re going to need a lot more of this advocacy at all levels of government. But regionally, we are seeing a lot of mixed messages.

Locally, Oregon state Sen. Anthony Broadman and Rep. Emerson Levy recently called for a repeal of Oregon’s recently
re-released wildfire maps, saying the
controversy over the maps was a distraction from the real work that needs to be done to prepare communities for the wildfires that will inevitably come. It’s not yet clear, if the legislature does decide to take action on the existence of the wildfire maps, whether that would mean a total do-over. But in this multi-step process, the details matter.

County Commissioner Phil Chang seemed to fully grasp the totality of the situation when this week, he voted against supporting a County-level appeal for some 21,000 homes in Deschutes County that are in the “red,” or “high risk,” zone on the maps. He voted “no” because the risk maps are a means to an end: They’re not about helping insurance companies raise rates (that’s been banned by the legislature), but about helping Oregon move forward on actually making our homes safer from wildfire.

Baked into the process around the wildfire maps was a process that, once the maps were put into place, would have required home-hardening and defensible space measures for the most at-risk homes.

By voting to appeal the map designations and stymie the process, Commissioners Patti Adair and Tony DeBone want homeowners to continue to be able to control their own destinies when it comes to how they treat — or don’t treat — their properties, even if those actions or inactions could lead to an entire surrounding community being less safe.

These maps are a first step toward more robust rules around protecting at-risk homes. That doesn’t sound like a distraction at all.

Right now, as it looks from the ground, the feds are taking a “burn it down” approach to federal employment and public lands that could quite literally burn while we wait for the courts and Washington, D.C., to fight it all out.

While that’s going on, we’re hoping for a less scattershot approach from our state and local leadership. Barring any more support from the feds, we need to find a way to work together to manage the fires that are inevitably going to come.