The state Department of Natural Resources may not own a crystal ball, but last year it certainly seemed as if it could predict the future. In the spring it spent $124,000 to create a firebreak in the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest. Just a few months later, on Labor Day, a lightning strike near Blewett Pass touched off what became known as the Labor Mountain Fire. It took 1,400 firefighters to bring it under control, and by the time it was extinguished 52 days later, 43,000 acres had burned.

Thanks to the firebreak, the state-owned Teanaway Community Forest was spared, and so were the cities of Roslyn and Cle Elum.

This wasn’t luck. This was part of a plan that has put our state at the leading edge of wildfire prevention and response. At the same time our neighbors in Oregon and California have been devastated by wildfire, Washington has turned the corner with a program that couples smart firefighting with best practices in forestry and fire prevention. We’re getting to fires faster, containing them sooner, and reducing their severity. And the biggest fire danger in the state right now appears to be in Olympia.

What happens over the next two weeks in our budget negotiations at the statehouse will determine whether we keep building on success or allow this program to languish. I am among a bipartisan group of legislators urging the House and Senate to stay the course and restore a $65 million cut before it is too late.

This program, launched under the leadership of former Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz, was created by the Wildfire Response, Forest Restoration and Community Resilience Act of 2021. Most of us refer to the House bill number and call it the 1168 program. Using 1168 funding, DNR has hired larger fire crews and put the state’s air fleet on standby at strategic locations around the state.

We’ve invested in new equipment and new technologies, like infrared cameras to detect fires 24 hours a day. We’re thinning forests to remove overgrowth and reduce the chance of deadly crown fires. We’re collaborating with federal agencies on projects like the firebreak that saved Cle Elum. And we are assisting private forest landowners in forest restoration by providing grants through local conservation districts.

What happened in 2024 tells the story. A little over 300,000 acres burned that year. That’s about a quarter of the destruction we saw in 2015, our worst fire season ever. But a better comparison is with the state of Oregon, which still fights fires the old-fashioned way, waiting for emergencies without being proactive about prevention. In 2024, Oregon saw a record 1.9 million acres go up in smoke. Meanwhile, our success continued last year as we held fires to 251,840 acres.

The problem is the Legislature’s natural tendency to see this as an ordinary government program we can expand or reduce depending on our priorities at the moment. That’s not the way this works. We set this up as an eight-year program costing $500 million, enough to treat 1.2 million acres of forest. That’s $125 million in each two-year budget cycle. After that, we enter maintenance mode.

Miss a season and we fall behind; miss a couple and we’re back where we started. Already, we are faltering. When budgets ran tight last year, this program was cut back to $60 million. Now we are entering the second year of the biennium, and it is time to act. If we don’t restore the missing $65 million, we put the entire effort at risk.

We’ll still fight fires because we have to. But the forest restoration effort at the heart of this program would be cut. The state’s chief forester tells us we would have to cut grant programs by 90 percent, slash the number of full-time firefighters who also do fuel reduction work, eliminate the fire-detection camera system – and more.

The governor proposed splitting the difference, using $30 million in Climate Commitment Act funding, the program that taxes motorists and businesses to reduce carbon emissions. I proposed a full restoration using climate funds in Senate Bill 5893, and budgets released last week in the state House and Senate followed my approach. We must remain vigilant to ensure this remains in the final deal. I believe there is no more appropriate use for our climate dollars than a program preventing our forests from becoming carbon. California learned this the hard way in 2020, when the C02 generated in a single fire season wiped out 16 years of carbon reductions from that state’s cap and trade program.

Right now, one of the hottest debates in Olympia is whether this climate money should be used for other purposes, and there is no shortage of ideas for spending. Let’s just make sure wildfire prevention is among them.

Sen. Shelly Short, R-Addy, is floor leader for the Senate Republican Caucus.