The wildfires around Los Angeles are heartbreaking and preventable.
Here’s the U.S. Forest Service back in 2002:
Unfortunately, the Forest Service operates within a statutory, regulatory, and administrative framework that has kept the agency from effectively addressing rapid declines in forest health. This same framework impedes nearly every other aspect of multiple-use management as well. Three problem areas stand out:
- Excessive analysis—confusion, delays, costs, and risk management associated with the required consultations and studies;
- Ineffective public involvement—procedural requirements that create disincentives to collaboration in national forest management; and
- Management inefficiencies—poor planning and decision-making, a deteriorating skills base,
and inflexible funding rules, problems that are compounded by the sheer volume of the required paperwork and the associated proliferation of opportunities to misinterpret or
misapply required procedures
These factors frequently place line officers in a costly procedural quagmire, where a single project can take years to move forward and where planning costs alone can exceed $1 million. Even noncontroversial projects often proceed at a snail’s pace.
Forest Service officials have estimated that planning and assessment consume 40 percent of total
direct work at the national forest level.
That would represent an expenditure of more than $250 million per year. Although some planning is obviously necessary, Forest Service officials have estimated that improving administrative procedures could shift up to $100 million a year from unnecessary planning to actual project work to restore ecosystems and deliver services on the
ground.
Things have not gotten better since.
In 2007 the Sierra Club successfully sued the Forest Service to prevent them from creating a Categorical Exclusion (CE) to NEPA for controlled burns (the technical term is “fuel reduction”). The CE would have allowed the forest service to conduct burns without having to perform a full EIS (the median time for which is 3.5 years).
In 2021 the outgoing Trump BLM was served with the […] notice of intent to sue by the Center for Biological Diversity for their fuel reduction plan in the Great Basin. BLM backed away from the plan after the transition.
Earlier today, the mayor of Los Angeles refused to answer questions from a reporter about her decision to cut the funding of the Los Angeles Fire Department by $17.6 million last June.
