Oregon lawmakers are meeting in Salem today to put out a budget fire.
Following a larger-than-ever fire season, two Oregon agencies are facing larger-than-ever bills. But the Oregon Department of Forestry and State Fire Marshal are short on cash.
The state’s complex and convoluted system of paying for wildfire suppression and prevention has been unable to keep pace with fire seasons that have grown larger and more expensive. This year’s total fire costs top $350 million, and while more than half of that amount will ultimately be reimbursed by the federal government, that process can take years.
In the meantime, contractors who sent employees to fight Oregon fires this year have been waiting for months to be paid for their work — and they’re not happy.
“You can’t go four months without money,” said Jim Angell, who runs a John Day excavating company that built fire lines for the state earlier this year; in late November, he said he was still owed nearly $100,000. “We’re pushing right at 120 days on getting paid for a couple of these things.’
The fix lawmakers will make in what looks to be a one-day special session is relatively straightforward. They are expected to send an additional $218 million to the two agencies, which will then hustle the money out the door.
Meanwhile, the burning question of how Oregon should tweak its wildfire funding system to offer more stability in big fire years will have to wait. It’s expected to be a hot topic in Salem during next year’s legislative session — though few obvious answers have emerged.
“Wildfire is an area we need to figure out, clearly,” state Sen. Kate Lieber, D-Portland, one of the Legislature’s top budget writers, said. “We know that wildfire is going to continue to be where it is or probably more. We shouldn’t delude ourselves that we’re going back to a $30 million fire season.”
Oregon’s 2024 fire season began mildly, as lower drought and above-normal snowpack persisted through early summer. But a series of heatwaves soon dried out shrubs and grasses that initially thrived in the wetter-than-usual spring. Then thunderstorms rolled through, sparking natural fires alongside many human-caused ones.
That all set the stage for Oregon’s most destructive fire season in modern times, in terms of acres burned.
By late July, the state had become the nation’s top firefighting priority as flames raced through dry forests and rangelands, mostly in Eastern Oregon. By August, over 13,000 firefighters were working Oregon fires at once. And by the end of the fire season, more than 1,000 wildfires – including six “megafires” larger than 100,000 acres — had burned across 1.9 million acres.
The cost of it all: $350 million, an amount state agencies were in no shape to pay.
A ‘spaghetti bowl’ approach
As wildfire seasons have grown longer and more destructive, Oregon’s system for funding wildfire response has proven increasingly inadequate.
That system comes with an overarching premise: Landowners and the state should share the cost of fighting wildfires that do not discriminate between private and public land. But in Oregon, the funding structure has morphed and grown over the years to the point where it’s hard for even experts to parse.
A 2021 report commissioned by the state called the system “arguably the most complex wildfire funding structure in the country.”
“We’ve tried to figure out different ways to depict it, to simplify ‘here’s how much comes in and from where,’” said Joy Krawczyk, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Forestry, which tackles much of the state’s wildfire response. Eventually the agency arrived at a chart known, tellingly, as “the spaghetti bowl.”
“It’s just a bunch of bubbles with lines all connecting each other,” Krawczyk said, “and it’s horrific.”
The state separates wildfire funding into two buckets. There is “base” funding, split between the state’s general fund and landowners in protected areas, who are assessed with a per-acre annual fee based on what kind of land they have and where it sits.
This base funding accounted for about $74 million this year, and allows the forestry department to maintain a system that tamps down most fires while they’re small.
The second bucket is funding for “large” fires that spread rapidly or pose imminent threats to lives or buildings. The first $20 million spent combating these blazes each year is shared between the state and landowners.
When the cost goes beyond that — as it often does these days — the general fund covers the balance. But lawmakers also use that pot of money to pay for schools, health care, and other pressing state priorities that compete with the forestry department at budget time.
“We just don’t have enough cash on hand to pay the folks who came out this year and worked thousands of hours protecting their neighbors and community members,” Krawczyk said. “Even if we liquidated everything we could possibly get, we still probably couldn’t get to that number.”
Among those waiting to be paid is Lee Miller. Miller is the owner of Miller Timber Services, a Philomath-based contractor that helps with virtually any service the state might need. When fire breaks out, Miller supplies fire crews, engines and water trucks to battle the blaze, along with heavy machinery that build fire lines to stop its spread.
“We try to cover the gamut,” he said.
The company has worked on wildfires for decades, and Miller says the state routinely pays its bills within 45 days. But this year, some of Miller’s invoices have sat unpaid for double that. Meanwhile, credit he’s taken out to pay his roughly 250 employees for their work on the fires is coming due.
“They owe us a substantial chunk of money,” Miller said. “A lot of creditors, their sense of humor is running out very quickly on this.”
Both Miller and Angell, the wildfire contractor in John Day, say they are sympathetic that the state has a funding conundrum — but they’re also tired of waiting for Oregon to sort out its finances.
“They should have thought about that before they hired everybody to put out their fires,” Angell said.
“They were tasked with a mission but not funded for that mission,” Miller said of the forestry department. “I believe it’s an oversight on the Legislature’s part, and on the governor’s.”
A looming fight over funding
It’s not that policy makers have ignored the wildfire funding puzzle.
Lawmakers put forward multiple bills earlier this year in hopes of bracing for the upcoming wildfire season. Two would have asked voters if they wanted to increase property taxes to help fund wildfire protection, or reinstate a tax on trees logged by private timber owners.
But the bills died, prompting predictions that have proven accurate.
”The whole issue of funding for the fire reality that we have nowadays is still unresolved and it leaves the Oregon Department of Forestry in a financially precarious position,” Jim Kelly, chair of the state’s Board of Forestry, told the Oregon Capital Chronicle in March. “Even if we have a normal fire season, they’re going to be running out of money and running to the Emergency Board.”
Rather than passing a funding proposal, the Legislature directed interested parties to come up with long-term wildfire solutions. A group of policymakers, local officials, industry groups and tribal members has been meeting monthly since June, and they aim to publish a progress report by the end of the year.
In an update to lawmakers last month, fire officials said the group has come up with about 20 ideas for potential funding solutions, but they didn’t get into specifics. They estimated the state needs about $300 million per biennium to cover all its firefighting needs.
“Some say, ‘Let’s just have the general fund pay for it all,’” said Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, who is on the working group. “Well, that’s absolutely not in the cards with the other pressures on the general fund.”
Golden sees a few options on Oregon’s table: pulling from the state’s lottery fund, dipping into the transient lodging tax collected from hotel fees, or taxing the private timber industry, something he proposed in a bill last year.
None are likely to be easy battles at the legislature.
“The punchline is everywhere you look for adequate funds is a big political fight,” Golden said.
Kotek has offered her own short-term suggestion for stemming future shortfalls.
In a budget released last week, the governor proposed rerouting $150 million the state is scheduled to save in its “rainy day fund” to instead give fire agencies more resources in the next two year budget.
“It’s not going to solve every problem,” Kotek told reporters, “but I do think they need additional dollars and that is a good way to spend.”
