Gov. Kotek signs $218 million wildfire funding bill, passed by Oregon lawmakers in one-day special session
Funds immediately available to Oregon Department of Forestry, Oregon State Fire Marshal
SALEM, Ore. (KTVZ) – Gov. Tina Kotek on Friday signed Senate Bill 5801, passed in Thursday’s legislative special session, that allocates $218 million to the Department of Forestry and the Oregon State Fire Marshal to pay for costs associated with the 2024 wildfire season.
ODF will receive $191.5 million and OSFM will receive $26.6 million, according to a news release from the governor's office, here in full, followed by a report from the Salem session by the Oregon Capital Chronicle:
A record 1.9 million acres burned this wildfire season, far exceeding the state’s 10-year average of 640,000 acres per season and incurring gross costs upwards of $350 million. While more than half of the costs will eventually be reimbursed by the federal government, the funds are needed to pay the firefighters, local fire services, and vendors who responded when Oregon called.
"This summer's wildfire season called for sacrifice, courage, and cooperation from everyone involved. It was an all hands on deck effort to protect life, land, and property," Governor Kotek said. "I am grateful to legislators for taking swift action to ensure the state's fire season costs are addressed and the bills are paid. Next year, I look forward to working with legislators to ensure the state finds a pathway for sustainable funding to cover wildfire costs in the years ahead."
“This summer, the Governor made clear the state’s commitment to protecting Oregonians, their communities and our state’s natural resources,” said State Forester Cal Mukumoto, director of the Oregon Department of Forestry.
“In this special session, the Governor and the Legislature underscored their commitment, and for that we’re incredibly appreciative. As soon as funds are available to us, it will be all hands on deck for our finance team to get payments to the vendors who provided critical services all summer. This will be our top priority until we get through all the invoices pending in the system.”
"I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to all the firefighters, ranchers, landowners, and countless others for their incredible effort during a record-setting season," State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple said. "We are thankful to have received the funding we requested. It reimburses our agency for the money paid to local fire agencies who stepped up to help their fellow Oregonians. We continue to pay these agencies as the invoices are received. This funding is critical to sustaining essential programs and services that protect Oregonians. We are working alongside our partners to find solutions to fix Oregon’s wildfire funding problem.”
On November 26, the Governor announced that she was using her constitutional authority to call a special session of the Oregon legislature for lawmakers to appropriate funds to pay for the historic 2024 wildfire season.
The Governor’s Recommended Budget for the 2025-27 biennium identifies the need for at least an additional $130 million through new revenue to modernize and fully fund the state’s wildfire readiness and mitigation programs on an ongoing basis. This direction is in addition to the specific recommendation for $150 million to be redirected from going into state reserves and instead be appropriated to the agencies to pay for wildfire suppression costs as needed.
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Oregon Legislature approves $218 million in additional wildfire funding in emergency session
By Alex Baumhardt and Julia Shumway, Oregon Capital Chronicle
When wildfires popped up in central Oregon this summer, Ken Jackola, the mayor of Lebanon and vice president of Rick Franklin Corp. was quick to respond.
For months, his employees at the company’s headquarters in Lebanon near Salem provided equipment and helped build emergency roads and corridors for firefighters who faced a historic season. This year, Oregon faced more than 2,000 fires that scorched nearly 2 million acres, a new record. The season ended in October but Jackola is still waiting for the Oregon Department of Forestry to reimburse all of his expenses.
“We’ve already paid payroll, fuel invoices for operations and all the other overhead that a business has to pay, and then we’re told by a state agency that they don’t have money to pay us back,” he said. “I don’t care what size company you are, $630,000 is still $630,000.”
His company is among many that have yet to be paid, prompting Gov. Tina Kotek to call a special legislative session Thursday to come up with $218 million to pay outstanding balances from the 2024 wildfire season.
Lawmakers voted 25-2 in the Senate and 42-2 in the House to pay that bill by sending $191.5 million to the state forestry department and $26.6 million to the Office of the State Fire Marshal to cover payments like those owed to Rick Franklin Corp.
That money is about two-thirds of the entire cost this year, which totaled more than $350 million. While around half is expected to be reimbursed by federal agencies, the state agencies have to pay contractors for their work upfront while they wait, sometimes for a year or more, for federal reimbursement.
2024 fire season cost: $352 million
Federal reimbursement expected: $200.5 million
Individual fire districts to pay: $2.2 million
Oregon forest land protection fund to pay: $10 million
Remainder for state to pay: $139.3 million
“For both agencies, basically, the fire season was expensive enough that we can’t float the money like we normally do,” said Joy Krawczyk, a spokesperson for the forestry department.
‘Absolutely unacceptable’
Lawmakers who voted for the funding, including Sen. Lynn Findley, R-Vale, said waiting to pay bills was “absolutely unacceptable.” Findley called for the head of the forestry department to resign before casting his vote.
“What we have done is put vendors on the hook for a lot of money,” Findley said. “They had to borrow money. They had to go into debt. And this is wrong. I did not know as a legislator, until the middle of November, about how bad this was.”
About a dozen uniformed firefighters were in the Capitol on Thursday to watch the Legislature act, watching from large screens in hearing rooms as lawmakers met in adjacent rooms. The House and Senate chambers were closed for construction, leaving lawmakers to sit shoulder-to-shoulder in hearing rooms on opposite ends of a long hall.
Sen. Fred Girod, R-Stayton, lost his home in the Santiam Canyon to the Beachie Creek wildfire in September 2020. He told his colleagues that it was the most traumatic experience of his life, and that he misses what he lost — the flying squirrels who traveled around the home, a picture of the steelhead he caught when he was 5 years old and all the little touches he and his wife spent hundreds of hours working on to make it their perfect home.
“All that’s just gone,” he said. “And it really hurts that fire is such a low priority in this state that we can’t even afford to pay the contractors that we hired to fight fires.”
The $218 million will come from the state’s general fund — paid for by Oregon tax payments — despite state land making up less than 2% of the burned acres. More than one-third of all acres burned have been on private land — mostly in eastern Oregon grass and shrublands. About 64% was on federal land, according to the Wildland Mapping Institute. At least 42 homes and 132 other structures were burned.
Wildfire protection and costs in Oregon are generally split between private and public landowners and the state’s general fund. But the money paid by private landowners, via a pot of money they fund through fees, is capped at $10 million once costs for any wildfire season exceed $20 million. This year, Oregonians through the general fund will pay more than 14 times as much for the fire season than private landowners.
Vote against
Rep. Paul Holvey, D-Eugene, has voted against most fire funding proposals in the past decade and voted against the funding measure Thursday. He said he disagrees with the state’s history of paying to fight wildfires and protect communities out of the state’s general fund, which leaves less money from education, public safety and transportation.
“It is time that these large forest landowners pay for the wildfire on their own lands, like most all of us do,” Holvey said.
Along with Holvey, Republican Sens. Dennis Linthicum of Beatty and Brian Boquist of Dallas and Rep. James Hieb, R-Canby, voted against the proposal.
In September, the Legislature’s Emergency Board allocated $47.5 million to the forestry department and fire marshal’s office to cover some outstanding costs. The Department of Forestry then asked the state Treasury for a $60 million loan in October but the Treasury turned that down, according to reporting from Willamette Week.
Paying for the increased costs of the longer and more expensive fire seasons associated with increasing drought and heat from climate change is a challenge the Legislature has sought for several years to address. It will hear in January from a wildfire cost committee that has spent the last year coming up with some ideas for sustainable wildfire funding.
So far the group — which includes politicians, state agency officials, lobbyists for the timber, ranching and agriculture industries, utility companies and county associations — has proposed a range of ideas for paying Oregon’s wildfire bills. They include new or increased taxes and fees — on insurers, campsites and timber, for example — or drawing money from the state’s “kicker” tax rebate. But none of the solutions appears to call on utility companies to contribute to the funding, despite causing some of the costliest fires in state history in recent years, including the 2020 Labor Day Fires, which killed nine people, destroyed thousands of homes and were the most expensive in Oregon history, costing as much as $1.2 billion.
Push for more logging
Republican lawmakers signalled that they’ll push to roll back logging restrictions, as they blame environmental regulations and reduced logging for worse fire seasons. Rep. Ed Diehl, R-Stayton, called for incoming President Donald Trump to “fix” the Endangered Species Act and Equal Access to Justice Act, which he said “created a lawsuit factory.”
“We’re not going to reduce wildfires by building electric car chargers,” Diehl said. “We’re not going to reduce wildfires by tearing out dams, and we will not reduce wildfires by building offshore wind farms. We will reduce wildfires by actively managing our lands, by selectively and sustainably harvesting, reducing our forest fuel loads and grazing our grasslands. We are stewards of these lands, not passive bystanders.”
Sen. Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, said that the Legislature needs to allocate more money toward fighting fires so lawmakers don’t find themselves in this same situation. He said lawmakers should have set aside extra money to wildland fire response when it had a high ending balance several years ago.
“We didn’t put enough money into the e-board,” he said, referring to the Legislature’s emergency board. “We didn’t have any money dedicated in the budget to address this need, and we should in the future.”
Rep. Dacia Grayber, a Tigard Democrat and the Legislature’s only firefighter, said knowing that Oregon faces hotter and drier weather and more fires keeps her up at night.
“We talk about this as a historic wildfire season,” Grayber said. “I think that we run the risk of this being our new normal.”
