Re-allocating funds from treating and reducing wildfire risk to wildfire suppression will not SOLVE any problems. In fact, it is simply perpetuating the problem, making it bigger and even more out of control. Why do you think we’ve got out-of-control wildfires this season? Why do you think California did not, in fact, see a cessation of “wildfire season,” and it just carried straight on through the winter? Not simply because of the label environmentalists and the government like to throw around, “global warming.”

Of COURSE it’s going to take the states time and allocation of funds to bring those lands back up to the quality that is needed to be of service to anyone; but asking about the financials isn’t the ONLY thing we should be concentrating on. Instead, ask WHY these public lands are ALL going up in flames, why the government needs to spend billions of dollars on the suppression of wildfires in the West (where the federal government controls more than 40% of ALL state lands, and poorly). Ask where we’re going to be in 15 years? With a devastated land, ashes blowing in the wind where once over-populated forests stood. All because the federal government refused to release their hold over land within Western states boundaries, to those states’ management and control, which has proven itself with the lands under state control.

Such a transfer has been made before, why not a final time? Why are the states in the West any different than the other states? Where’s the equality? There are no second-class people, why are there second-class states?