Wildfire bill signed by Governor
I'm Bob Larson. One of the many bills signed by Governor Jay Inslee after the close of the latest legislative session aims at improving wildfire preparedness and prevention.
Moses Lake Representative Tom Dent sponsored House Bill 2561 that will have the commissioner of public lands redirect the wildland fire advisory committee ...
DENT ... "And what that's going to do is it's going to give our wildfire advisory committee a couple of new tasks, one of them is to take and look at our Firewise and other fire prevention programs and see if we can expand them, how we can help pay for them as maintenance items as we go forth which eliminates quite a bit of fuel from our forests and especially around the housing areas."
Dent says our wildfires concerns expand beyond populated areas ...
DENT ... "And the next thing we're going to do is we're going to ask them to take a look at fire in 'no-man's land' and how we can maybe find a way to pay for that. Currently, when we get a fire in 'no-man's land' it takes off, it just goes. Our small fires, just around us, they don't want to touch it because they could use up their entire budget. And so, nobody touches it until it gets into some place where there's a district and then they can look for state mobilization help, so we're going to take a look at that and see if we can't improve on that."
Another boost for wildfire prevention came in the recently passed $1.3-Trillion omnibus spending bill, sponsored by Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, that hopes to fix chronic wildfire funding problems, following the most expensive year ever for the fires.
