Wildfire funding is a ‘must do’ for the session, legislative leaders say. So what’s the plan?

Last December, Gov. Tina Kotek called lawmakers into a

special session

to help Oregon’s fire agencies pay outstanding bills after a record wildfire season laid bare the consequences of the state’s

long-standing juggling act

to pay for fire response.

Lawmakers in both parties


gave speeches about the importance of finding better ways to prevent and pay for wildfires as they approved a

$218 million


bailout

to cover unpaid debts to contractors who fought Oregon fires. They urged one another to find a fix to the broken wildfire funding puzzle during the 2025 session.

Less than three weeks remain in that five-month session. And while lawmakers are working behind the scenes to generate a plan, they have not delivered a clear or public vision to fund wildfire mitigation and suppression in a more sustainable way.

“The tick of the clock is really loud right now,” Sen. Jeff Golden, an Ashland Democrat and staunch advocate for fire funding, said last week.

How did we get here?

Wildfire insiders have long known that the state’s funding mechanism for preventing and fighting wildfires

is complicated and problematic

.

The state draws wildfire funding from several places, including fees assessed on rural landowners, the state general fund and timber taxes. Prior to 2013, the Oregon Department of Forestry generally had enough money to cover the costs of flighting large emergency fires, which

averaged less than $10 million a year

, said Kyle Williams, the department’s deputy director. In the decade since, the scale of those fires has surged – as has the cost. The five-year average to suppress and contain large wildfires, taking the huge bill from 2024 into account, is now upwards of $75 million


per year for Oregon’s fire agencies.

The Oregon Forestry Department and Department of the State Fire Marshal routinely draw on their operational budgets to front emergency wildfire costs while they wait for repayment from the state and federal government, a system that lawmakers and fire agencies have said is unworkable.

“The pressure that has built up around how we sustainably and durably fund our wildfire response programs is a decade plus in the making,” Williams said.

That caught up to the agencies last year


after a record wildfire season left the state with a more than $200 million budget hole. The 2024 fire season, which set a new record for nearly 2 million acres burned, was nearly five times more expensive than the 10-year average.

“The landscape has literally changed,”

a legislative budget review says

.

Lawmakers and state leaders have been well aware of the need for a new funding stream to combat wildfires for years. In 2019, Gov. Kate Brown created a

wildfire council

to look for a cohesive wildfire strategy; one of the council’s suggestions was to find a better way to pay for it. Yet another task force on the topic, this one convened in 2024, has contributed to the funding conversation at the Legislature this year. It presented a collection of ideas for the state to come up with $280 million per biennium to fund wildfire efforts, none of which has yet been put to a substantive vote.

The clamor for the Legislature to come up with a stockpile of money for wildfire efforts may seem familiar. In 2021, following Brown’s task force and 2020’s terrible wildfire season, lawmakers

allocated $220 million

from the general fund to make Oregon’s landscape more resilient to wildfire and shore up Oregon’s fire response.

That kickstarted several initiatives within state fire agencies.


But the money didn’t last. Hence the clamor for $280 million more for future funding cycles.

The 2024 wildfire funding task force has proposed lawmakers find $150 million a biennium to pay to suppress large fires, a figure based on the state’s five-year average cost. The other $130 million the task force said was necessary is primarily for fire readiness and mitigation, including $12 million for grants that help local fire districts hire firefighters and $10 million each for home hardening efforts and

youth workforce programs

that help clear flammable brush around rural homes in high risk areas.

As lawmakers debate whether and how to come up with that money, the 2025 fire season has started early – and the outlook is not good.

The forecast calls for above average temperatures and drought that will extend to the western side of the state.

By August

, all of Oregon and surrounding states are projected to be at above normal risk for wildland fire – which means that oft-shared firefighting resources will be stretched thin when the danger hits its peak.

That regional forecast is as bad as Deputy State Fire Marshal Travis Medema has seen it in his 31 years of wildland firefighting: “That does not forebode well.”

If lawmakers find the $280 million that fire advocates are hoping for, Williams at the forestry department said the money could help right away. It could boost funds for early fire detection and for air support, in addition to funding fire prevention work that helps “turn the Titanic” long term.

What next?

House Speaker Julie Fahey said Monday that finding wildfire funding is a “must do” for the 2025 session.

Three bills are circulating that propose six potential funding options dreamed up by the wildfire funding workgroup that met before the 2025 session. One bill proposes withholding Oregon’s

personal income tax “kicker”

rebate to create an investment fund, then using interest from that fund to generate money for wildfires each biennium. Another would redirect money from Oregon’s lottery funds to pay for wildfire. And a third bill,

House Bill 3940

, contains the bulk of the funding options, which include diverting money from state reserves, using an insurance tax that normally goes into the general fund and adding a nonrefundable tax on Oregon’s bottles and cans.

It has been five weeks since the most recent hearing on any of those bills.

What’s more, several of the funding ideas have generated significant pushback. Republicans argue taking the kicker is untenable, and at least some of them would have to get behind the idea in order for it to achieve the requisite two-thirds majority needed to hold back any portion of the kicker. Environmentalists and many Democrats have mounted fierce opposition to the idea of taxing bottles and cans to pay for wildfire, and it appears they’ll be successful in chasing that option out of contention. And Democrats have been vocal that they don’t want to use already allocated revenue – like general fund or lottery dollars – to foot the bill for wildfires.

“It would be a shame if we leave the building without a new source of funding for wildfires,” Ashland Rep. Pam Marsh, a Democrat, said Monday. “People are working hard to find out where we land on this, but it is not clear at the moment.”

An idea that insiders say is floating to the top of the list of contenders comes from Malin Republican E. Werner Reschke. He wants to use the interest generated by Oregon’s Rainy Day Fund savings account to pay for wildfire. For the 2025-27 session, that interest is around $160 million – which gets lawmakers more than halfway to the $280 they’re looking for.

Reschke favors pulling more money out of the body of the Rainy Day Fund itself to cover the other half, though doing so would be complicated. The powerful co-chairs of the budget-writing Joint Ways and Means Committee, who have flagged that they’re

going to safeguard

Oregon’s reserves in case the economic outlook worsens, would need to be convinced to give up, at minimum, the interest on the Rainy Day Fund,

which currently rolls back into

that savings account. That fund is

projected to hit

$1.9 billion as the 2023-25 biennium comes to a close.

“My thinking is: We have enough money in our system right now. We don’t have to ask taxpayers for more of their money,” Reschke said.

On Monday, Fahey said that the House Revenue Committee that Marsh and Reschke sit on will likely unveil a plan for funding wildfire soon.

Gov. Tina Kotek, who has been urging lawmakers to work on this issue for months, said Monday that she was frustrated that the wildfire deliberations are not further along. She was still talking to lawmakers about solving the problem.

“I’m looking for bipartisan solutions here. It would be a terrible thing to end this session without dedicated funding,” she told reporters on Monday. “And it’s been unclear to me what (legislative budget writers) plan to do in their budget as well on this issue.”

Last week, some lawmakers said they felt locked in a game of chicken. Golden, who has sponsored the Senate bill to hold back some or all of the kicker, was tweaking that bill while watching for news from the House, where any bills to raise revenue must originate. He told the Senate Revenue Committee at an April hearing on his bill that it should “evaluate the viability” of a House funding proposal before deciding on the kicker.

“If the bill from the House has the kind of problems that some folks are describing, I want you to have the alternative that this bill offers,” Golden said at the time.

Reschke, in the House, said he assumed there was some calculus behind stalling wildfire bills to see if Republicans might concede to hold back the kicker. He pointed to

Senate Bill 83

– a bill that would repeal a wildfire risk map and associated home hardening requirements – which has been stalled in the House Rules Committee instead of sent to a floor vote.

“I’m hoping that as we get closer to the deadline here that we do something,” he said last week.

If lawmakers don’t come up with a revenue stream for funding wildfire, they’ll end up paying fire suppression bills out of the general fund anyway, just like they had to do last December, Reschke said.

Fahey said on Monday that she’s not holding the wildfire map “hostage,” as Republican lawmakers suggest.

She argued that if lawmakers are going to repeal requirements for how Oregonians in high-risk areas must harden their home against wildfire, then she wants to see dedicated funding to support alternative fire prevention efforts.

“It’s not about holding anything hostage. It’s about holding ourselves accountable to delivering that funding mechanism,” she said. “You can’t take something away without a plan for what’s replacing it.”

Sami Edge covers higher education and politics for The Oregonian. You can reach her at


sedge@oregonian.com


or (503) 260-3430.

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