Money to burn

The next time you discover, after it’s too late to make other arrangements, that the Forest Service or BLM restroom you’re visiting contains not a scrap of toilet paper, you might be wise to blame a wildfire.

It’s not that a blaze burned the toilet paper (although flames certainly would, given the chance.)

They burn through hundreds of millions of our dollars.

Money that’s supposed to pay for all manner of items — among them toilet paper.

In what has become an unfortunate annual tradition, federal agencies shift money that was set aside for some other purpose into the military-style assaults on wildfires across the country.

This blank-check policy might satisfy the public when an inferno is advancing on a subdivision, but the long-term effects go well beyond poorly provisioned outhouses.

In some cases the Forest Service and BLM, due to exorbitant firefighting spending, have had to cancel or postpone forest thinning projects that would actually reduce the risk of future wildfires.

This makes no sense.

Oregon’s senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, agree.

We support their proposal, introduced last week in the Senate, to set up an emergency wildfire fund.

Wyden and Merkley want to move $834 million from existing firefighting accounts into a new “Federal Land Assistance Management and Enhancement fund” (FLAME — what a clever acronym).

The idea here is that when the fire tab escalates, the Forest Service and BLM can tap FLAME rather than their individual budgets.

This makes a lot of sense.

(Although we feel compelled to ask, since the $834 million was already allocated for fighting fires, why federal officials instead plundered the toilet paper accounts?)

Wyden’s and Merkley’s plan could be improved slightly, though.

We recommend the Forest Service cancel its plan to spend $2.8 million from the stimulus package, money that’s supposed to be used for “wildland fire management,” on creating “green jobs” in the District of Columbia.

There are no national forests in the nation’s capital and, so far as we can tell, little risk there of a wildfire that would need to be managed.

A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said this: “Wildland fire management is not just for fighting fires.”

All right. But surely the term must have something to do with fire, which is a pretty simple word. The $2.8 million should go toward putting out actual fires in real forests.