The crippling costs of wildfires: Why Idaho can’t afford to take over federal lands | Opinion
Tuesday’s meeting of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, the part of the Legislature that writes state budgets, contained an important lesson about the dangers of the federal land-grabbing movement.
That movement has been revived by a recent lawsuit filed by the state of Utah — which Attorney General Raúl Labrador decided to slap your name on. That lawsuit asked the U.S. Supreme Court to force the federal government to “dispose of” vast swaths of public lands throughout the West. The Supreme Court refused to hear the meritless case, but it’s likely the case will be refiled in a lower court.
Tuesday’s hearing was focused on the Idaho Department of Lands, which oversees state endowment lands — public land set aside at the state’s founding to be managed for the benefit of public schools.
Sen. Melissa Wintrow, D-Boise, posed an important question: What would it cost Idaho to fight wildfires if it became responsible for all the federal land in the state?
“That would be a significant fire bill for us to pay,” said Department of Lands Director Dustin Miller. “I don’t think we could afford to pay that bill.”
He’s right.
The costs of fighting fires on the roughly 2.5 million acres managed by the Idaho Department of Lands has varied between $30 million and $100 million in recent years, a legislative analyst told the committee.
There are about 32 million acres of federal land in Idaho. So if Idaho had to fight all the fires on those lands, a reasonable guess is that it might cost $380 million in a cheap year or $1.3 billion in an expensive year. For context, the high figure is about one-sixth of Idaho’s total annual state tax revenue or about 10 times the annual budget of the Idaho State Police.
But if Idaho took charge of these lands, it would reduce the amount the federal government needs to spend on those fires. So would it be simply a matter of keeping Idaho tax dollars at home, rather than sending them to the distant feds?
That won’t work.
As the Rockefeller Institute notes, like many relatively lower-income states, Idaho receives far more federal government spending than Idaho families and businesses pay in federal taxes each year. Idaho is subsidized by higher income states like California, Washington and Massachusetts. In fact, in 2022 Idaho received about $3,164 in net revenue from the federal government — per person. For perspective, that’s roughly 24 times the amount at stake in the income tax cuts the Legislature is contemplating this year, which Speaker Mike Moyle, R-Star, characterized as probably the largest in history.
And this problem will get worse over time, not better, because climate change is making wildfires much worse over time, and greater human expansion into forested areas has made fires more complicated to fight. In the mid-1980s, federal firefighting expenditures ranged from $203 million to $579 million per year (about $611 million to $1.7 billion in today’s dollars), according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Since 2020, costs have ranged from $2.3 billion to $4.4 billion.
“We are seeing more of a trend in the size and complexity of fires, and costs are going up,” Miller told the committee.
That’s why state control of federal lands only has one meaning: selling off public lands to the highest bidder. Idaho cannot afford the cost of keeping them, so turning them over to the state means losing the places where you hunt, fish, graze, ride, hike, camp and climb. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to pull the wool over your eyes.