Senators grill Forest Service on attrition rates among its Southern California firefighters
By BEN GOAD, the Riverside County Press-Enterprise Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Forest Service will be fully staffed this Southern California fire season despite the exodus of scores of agency firefighters, the nation’s top forest official said Tuesday.
But lawmakers at Tuesday’s hearing on the Forest Service’s budget said they remain troubled by the high attrition rate of first-year firefighters, and one agency critic said the problem is far worse than officials admit.
Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey acknowledged that the agency has a problem retaining personnel in the region, particularly as entry-level firefighters leave in droves to take better-paying jobs with municipal fire departments or with Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting entity.
Nearly half of the Forest Service’s first-year firefighters in Southern California — 46.6 percent — left the agency’s employ in 2007. The national attrition rate is 26.6 percent, according to a Forest Service report presented to lawmakers at a hearing Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Agriculture Subcommittee.
The San Bernardino National Forest and adjacent Angeles National Forest — two of the nation’s most fire-threatened forests — had the most resignations of any of California’s 18 forests last year, according the Forest Service report.
Rey announced that the agency is working on a plan to reverse the Southern California trend. But he also said that recruitment levels nationally are sufficient to fill the vacancies created by departing firefighters.
“These positions have to be filled, and the pay scales have to be comparable,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said as she left the hearing.
Under sharp questioning from Feinstein, the subcommittee’s chairwoman, Rey vowed that the agency would indeed fill the positions funded for the region in the federal budget.
But Casey Judd, business manager for the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, a firefighter employee group, said he doubts Rey will be able to keep his word.
“For him to promise that they could staff at the funded level is just irresponsible,” said Judd, who attended the hearing but did not testify. … [more]