$74M for fires: Wyoming braces for next fire season

LANDER —  This past year was one of Wyoming’s worst fire years on record, Gov. Mark Gordon told the press in a post-legislative session interview. More than 850,000 acres burned, he said, with fires raging on private property, on state owned land, and in national forests and other federally-managed areas.

The state burned through funds to fight these fires, too, spending all of its firefighting reserves, the governor’s contingency account, Homeland Security disaster contingency funds, and borrowing from its rainy day account – and the cost of fires doesn’t end when they go out, as recovery and reclamation efforts have their own price tags.

In his supplemental budget, Gordon recommended about $140 million for recovering from and bracing for future wildfires.

One of his top goals coming into the session, Gordon explained, was to “think programmatically about how do we mitigate against having future wildfire danger?”

When the Wyoming State Legislature voted not to pass the supplemental budget, things were looking grim for the summer of 2025.

In many parts of the state, it’s been a relatively dry winter, and with limited funding to put toward labor to stem their advance, quick-growing and highly flammable invasive species

such as cheatgrass may fill in the burned areas.

Meanwhile, federal layoffs and funding changes may result in fewer federal firefighters available to lend a hand – and with its small population, Wyoming often relies heavily on federal wildland firefighters when fighting large fires.

Some recovery funds for land owners were provided in other legislation – but legislators voted to offer these in the form of loans, rather than grants.

Already this year, there have been substantial fires in southeastern Wyoming.

At the tail end of the legislative session, a bill sponsored by Sen. Eric Barlow, R-Gillette, was signed off on by the heads of both chambers and sent to the governor for his signature.

Senate File 152 outlines the appointment of a state forester, details the duties and responsibilities of that office, and provides a little more than $22 million to replenish the accounts that were drained over the summer.

It also allows the governor to borrow up to $30 million from the legislative stabilization reserve account “as necessary to meet funding requirements to fight wildfires in the event the reserves in the office of state lands and investments’ forestry division have been exhausted.”

Additionally, the bill allows for $2,750,000 to the office of state lands and investments for one full-time and four part-time firefighting related positions.

And $49,479,564 was appropriated from the general fund to the Wyoming wildlife and natural resource trust income account.

“These funds are continuously appropriated from the Wyoming wildlife and natural resource trust income account to the Wyoming wildlife and natural resource trust account board to provide grants to Wyoming conservation districts, weed and pest districts and the game and fish commission for purposes of restoring grass, hay and other vegetation destroyed by wildfires on private and state lands, preventing the establishment of nonnative, invasive terrestrial vegetation on private and state lands affected by wildfires and replacing and restoring habitats on private and state lands destroyed by wildfires,” the bill reads.

Gordon did line-item veto a portion of the bill that would have provided further loan options, noting in a press release that it “robbed” those funds from Energy Matching Funds intended to support Wyoming’s core energy industries.

Even so, the $74 or so million appropriated by the bill, plus the $30 million in borrowing authority for the governor, still falls far short of the governor’s requested $140 million – and concerns about the upcoming fire season remain.

“If we get into a bad year, I guess a special session may be in order,” Gordon observed.

An emergency special session of the legislature would be required to appropriate more funding if the state’s reserves run dry and surpass the governor’s borrowing authority.

This story was published on March 22, 2025.