(The Center Square) — The Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget approved a series of mid-year budget adjustments Friday, including spending on firefighting that generated some important discussion.
“When was the last time we made any significant investments into our ability to fight these forest fires and the equipment for the office of forestry?” Rep. Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, asked state officials at a committee meeting Friday to consider a measure to give the Department of Agriculture and Forestry to authority to spend $3.4 million in federal funds.
In the last budget, “we received two allocations from the state general fund. One was a half-million dollars that went into repair of existing equipment – major repairs that we needed to have completed,” Louisiana State Forester Wade Dubea said.
“There was an additional sum of money for the purchase of new equipment.”
Kevin Finley, deputy undersecretary for Department of Agriculture and Forestry’s management and finance, confirmed “the other money was approximately $3.6 million, some in supplemental, some in (the main budget bill HB1) for the purchase of new dozers and transport trucks for those.”
“Anybody that buys dozers like I do knows that doesn’t go very far,” McFarland said. “And when you fight the type of fires you all have been responsible for fighting, you see how much outside resources we’ve had to depend upon, I believe … looking over your budget for the last eight years, we haven’t had the appropriate revenue resources for you to purchase the equipment you need.”
Dubea said when he took over the forestry department 12 years ago, it had about 250 employees, while today it employs a total of about 182, of which roughly 155 are firefighters.
McFarland highlighted 2023 as “probably the largest wildfire effort we’ve had in the state’s history” and the widespread geography of the blazes, fueled by a “tinderbox” of downed vegetation from hurricanes.
Other discussions centered on how the department processes requests for resources, and the cause of delays in responses to some areas. About 390 personnel continue to fight four large wildfires in western and central Louisiana that have consumed a combined 39,936 acres. The effort is drawing on resources from many agencies with bulldozers, planes, helicopters, dozens of fire engines and tractor plow units.
The most recent estimate for combined spending on those fires – Tiger Island Fire, Highway 113 Fire, Lions Camp Road Fire, and Elizabeth Fire – is now at $12.79 million. Efforts on those fires are now managed by the Southern Area Blue Center for Initial Military Training.
The ongoing blazes are among hundreds of other smaller fires that have spread across the state during the hot dry summer.
“My question is: Why did it take so long for us to get help?” said Rep. Larry Bagley, R-Stonewall, adding that his inquires suggested struggles in his northwest district were due to manpower rather than money.
He suggested officials streamline the process for requesting help, because “there’s a good chance it will happen again.”
Dubea clarified the widespread fires have taxed the department in terms of both money and manpower. The department “mobilized … all of our available assets” to districts with large fires “without completely depleting the assets in those other districts, to leave some protection there.”
“We had everything that was available to us thrown at the fires as they came up,” he said.
Chairman Sen. Jerome Zeringue, R-Houma, noted that while the legislature has allocated money for new bulldozers, they not yet available to fight this summer’s fires. Dubea confirmed the department is now at 21 bulldozers, once the new machines come in.
“We’ve been calling John Deere daily,” Dubea said.
