Smoking Out Some Money

California wildfires arrived three weeks early this year, with blazes that have charred more than 25,000 acres in Riverside County since Monday. The fire prevention hearing that Rep. Doug Ose (D-Sacramento) chaired Wednesday in the House of Representatives could not have been more urgent.

At that hearing, William McCammon, president of the California Fire Chiefs Assn., needled Ose by comparing “federal funding for fire prevention to ... [desert] rain that falls from the sky but evaporates before it hits the ground.”

Although fire departments in the state requested $49 million in federal grants for reducing brush, only $7 million may be available statewide this year. And although Congress last year designated $120 million for removal of diseased and dead trees in Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) estimates that “only a total of $10 million will be spent in 2004.”

With fires already taking hold, however, attitudes at the federal level are shifting. On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman delighted county supervisors throughout the state by announcing that her department would waive a requirement that counties match 25% of the $120 million for tree removal with local funds. The match was preventing cash-strapped counties from claiming the federal funds.

Now that more money may be reaching the ground, the challenge falls to county-based fire planning boards to spend it well. The U.S. Forest Service predicts the cost of clearing all 2.7 million fire-prone acres in Southern California at billions of dollars.

The new federal funding also has to go hand in hand with better regional planning. For instance, 900 dwellings burned last fall in San Bernardino County, which requires homeowners to clear only 30 feet of brush around woodland homes each spring. But only 38 homes were lost in Ventura County, where the requirement is 100 feet. Regional issues also include bureaucratic kinks, such as the inability of officials in different departments to contact one another during emergencies, a problem that was particularly dire last fall in San Diego County.

In the longer term, counties and the state will have to answer politically difficult questions. Should people who buy houses in fire-prone areas pay fire insurance rates commensurate with their risk? Should insurance companies require inspectors to visit clients’ houses to ensure that they have cleared away flammable foliage? Should counties be forced, as a condition of federal funding, to enact regionwide zoning to prevent developers from going “zoning shopping” -- finding a place for a development after being denied permission to build it 10 miles down the road?

Federal funding for brush and tree clearance is vital. But the whole drought/fire/beg-for-help cycle is likely to recur without some tough political decisions on prevention -- and lasting regional cooperation.