When wildfires roared through Washington during the summer and fall of 2014 and 2015, they caught people’s attention, even Democratic state lawmakers from the Puget Sound area such as Rep. Larry Springer.
“We come back to Olympia after each of those years needing to spend tens of millions of dollars to reimburse those efforts to put those fires out," Springer said. "That is not a sustainable message.”
So Springer joined with Rep.Joel Kretz (R-Okanogan County) to introduce a bill that aims to prevent future fires. Their bill requires the Department of Natural Resources to prioritize state lands that are most in need of active management.
Kretz says the bill will take the worst of those lands, do some thinning, build some fire breaks and try to make it more difficult for future fires to grow so large.