Gov. Inslee signs Dent's Firewise bill

A piece of priority legislation by Rep. Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake, was signed into law recently, tasking the wildland fire advisory committee with reviewing wildfire prevention, response and suppression and recommending improvements to the state’s fire mobilization.

“The wildfires in our state have been devastating the last few years. I am constantly working on ways to strengthen our fight against wildfires and improving forest health,” Dent said. “During the interim we found some areas in our wildfire response and initial attack that we can improve upon. We want to build on that.”

One area the bill looks to address is how the state should manage and fund fires that occur in no-man’s-lands, so called because they don’t fall under the jurisdiction of any fire district. Though the burden of fighting those fires often falls on local fire districts, their lack of jurisdiction creates barriers to mobilizing the state’s larger firefighting resources.

Most of the land in Washington state that isn’t covered by a fire district is located east of the Cascades, where districts are far larger and more rural.

“We’re trying to look at how can we handle fires in these no-man’s-lands and find a way to pay for them without breaking the backs of small fire districts,” Dent said. “These smaller districts don’t have very large budgets, so they can just gobble up everything they have in one fire like that.”

The bill also would help to maintain and expand preexisting Firewise programs. Though federal grants help establish Firewise programs in states, which are designed to help mitigate the severity and likelihood of a fire, there are no federal funds to maintain and improve on those programs without a measure like House bill 2561, Dent said.

The committee will also review community programs that educate homeowners on the preparations they can make to better prevent fires, as well as preventative projects in areas at risk of wildfires.

Additionally, an amendment to the bill proposed by Sen. Kevin Van De Wege, D-Sequim, a lieutenant with Clallam County Fire District No. 3, directs the committee to establish plans to better serve non-English speaking residents during wildfires, a particularly high risk among Eastern Washington’s migrant worker population.

Though glad to see his priority legislation signed into law, Dent noted the state could have benefited from enacting these measures years ago.

“We should have done this sooner,” Dent said. “People have been having meetings for years, and all the notes from these meetings have raised the same issues we’re talking about today, but nobody’s taken action. I’m trying to take action.”