"We have always said that large fires in even-numbered years are tough, because they're political years."
It's all these outside influences that take effect. We have always said that large fires in even-numbered years are tough, because they're political years. And when you're dealing with a year like last year, which was a national election year—even bigger, even bigger. You deal a lot with congressional representatives and senators, because they want to make a big splash. They're running for office, and they're always, "How can we help? What can we do to help?" Well, by that time, it's beyond help! (laughs).
What we don't have is people trained and skilled and doing the engine foreman work, or the assistant foreman work, or enough to be squad bosses for hotshot crews. It's those positions that they're hurting for, because it's kind of cutting off our nose in spite of our face. In order to save money, we didn't train people right, so guess what we ended up with here?
That's just a natural reaction. That happened all over the United States in all agencies, because even though we had these rules, these guidelines that said we need to have all these people, we never had the money to do that. The agencies were never given the money. So when I went to the regional office, the first thing that happened was when we had the severe fire year, you start getting calls from congressional members, from their staffers, saying, "Hey, congressman wants to know what he can do to help the situation." In a bad fire year, there's a thing called severity, and all you have to do is show you have a severe condition over and above the normal, and you get money. It's one of the easiest things to do, being the budget staff in the federal government, probably is to get fire severity money, because it doesn't take much to show that you're in a bad fire year.
So you put down a request, and you get the money for extra engines to bring over, or extra helicopters, or an extra air tanker, or work people longer, or whatever you think is necessary to handle the situation. And that's something we tried to tell the congressmen, "You've already got a system set for a bad year. What we need is a balancing of the money during the other years, to where if your budget's down here, and we need to be up here, to have all these [foremen set in place.
...Now, everybody in this region is up to at least a minimum level of staffing in all those jobs. And we need to keep that level, and that's what we keep telling Congress. This is not a two-year problem. We just now hired all those people on a thirty-year contract. We've got to keep that. We have to maintain that. Obviously, when you drop in levels, then you've got a problem. Not you don't have enough money to pay salary, if it drops. Congressional ways of doing business, boy, it was like that. Generally, any program that you start is pretty good for two years. But after two years, for example, if you go into a spell to where you don't have a whole lot of fires, and it doesn't get a whole lot of congressional attention, you start losing money. Why? Because it's just not in their vote. They're wanting to put on power company stuff in California, because of the energy crunch and all that. And that's the name of the game. So it really takes a lot of politicking, or whatever you want to call it, to make sure that your budget stays up there. That's why everybody's got the minimum level. It's going to take a lot of work to maintain it. A lot of work to maintain it.